Struggling to plan your delivery route for the day? Or to navigate your way through multiple stops without causing a delay? These are only a few of the many challenges that a delivery driver faces each day.
The result? More time gets lost in planning the routes rather than optimal completion of deliveries, obstructing the expansion of business operations.
That’s when a delivery route planner app comes to your rescue. It not only saves your drivers’ time but also improves the entire process, helping scale delivery operations significantly. But before we explore how, let’s first understand in brief what delivery route planner software is.
What is Delivery Route Planning Software?
As the name suggests, a delivery route planning system is a tool that helps you plan the most optimized and efficient routes for your day-to-day deliveries. It goes beyond mapping the ideal delivery route between Point A and Point B by identifying the one which is cost-effective, faster, offers multiple stops, optimized shifts, and delivery schedules.
Whether you’re an individual delivery driver or run a delivery business, switching to such solutions is a wise decision to make.
Here’s how a delivery route planner can help you grow your business:
8 Ways a Route Planner App Can Help Scale Your Operations As a Delivery Driver
Unlimited Stops
When you’re out delivering orders, you often need more than one stop en-route. Sometimes this number is 10, while other times, it crosses 40 or more. While adding these stops in your manually planned routes is both cumbersome and error-prone, a delivery route planner simplifies it in a few clicks within minutes. That saves you precious time, letting you cover more deliveries.
Quick Access to Routes
A delivery route planner app can instantly send your delivery routes for the day via text messages or emails. With such a quick receipt of details, you can set off on time, meeting the ETA requirements.
Route Management
From saving a recurring route to duplicating an existing one to excel imports of multiple addresses in one go, all of that is possible with your delivery routing software. Without having to compromise your breaks. Besides, you can schedule orders months in advance. That helps paint a clearer picture of your business operations & availability, enabling beneficial decisions.
Automation & Optimization
Delivery routing app’s smart location-based functions autocomplete addresses as you type, preventing any mistakes. Moreover, it identifies more cost-effective and the shortest routes based on time or distance sequencing, enabling you to take on more orders and complete those punctually.
GPS Support & Tracking
Already use a GPS? Fortunately, most of the delivery route planners offer effortless integration with diverse GPS, along with continuous monitoring. That speeds up the entire process, saving both your fuel and time.
Prioritization
With a route planner, you can define priority – not just for your orders but also for each stop on your way. You get to categorize stops into High, Low, Medium, and Crucial, adhering to the time constraints of every stops. Based on this information, the system plans & optimizes your routes, letting you fulfill urgent deliveries on time, every time. That, in turn, increases customer satisfaction, fostering repeat business opportunities.
Driving Preferences
Whether you want to avoid the tolls and ferries or take particular highways while delivering parcels, you can set and update driving preferences in your delivery route planner hassle-freely. What’s more? You can choose from optimized route options every day according to the vehicle you’re using, ensuring you spend less time on the road.
Multiple Proof of Delivery Options
With a delivery routing tool, you can update and report the order status digitally, whether it is a successful or unsuccessful delivery, almost in an instance. There are multiple ways to capture proof of delivery, from photos to digital signatures. That way, you can do away with the need to carry papers or maintain manual documentation of each delivery, focusing on taking more deliveries.
Which Delivery Route Planner Should You Choose?
Thanks to the benefits it offers, the market is full of effective delivery route planning software. However, there are a few that do the job better. And Upper Route Planner is one of those. It packs in an easy-to-use interface with automated route planning, a driver mobile app, multiple stops, reporting, and much more to save you time, fuel, and cost while boosting your operations.
MapQuest is another reliable, free delivery routing software to plan and optimize your daily delivery routes. It can provide optimized routes for a maximum of 26 locations, at a time, based on either the shortest time or distance.
To choose a best-fit solution for your delivery routing business, identify your requirements first and compare them against the product’s features. It will narrow down your search & help find the right solution.
