Your Ultimate Guide to Delivery Route Planning Software in USA 

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Your Ultimate Guide to Delivery Route Planning Software in USA 

As per recent research, the last mile delivery in North America is set to expand by $74.36 billion between 2022 and 2026, registering a growth rate of 16.48% throughout the projected period. This growth can be attributed to the increasing B2C e-commerce sector in the United States, the upscale trend in goods and merchandise delivery, and the growth in parcel logistics. 

This increased demand for delivery services is not only pressurizing the legacy fulfillment networks, but it is also driving businesses to adopt intelligent technologies for streamlining operations and reducing costs.

Delivery route planning software is one such intelligent technology that helps businesses reduce costs related to fuel, vehicle leasing, delivery fulfillment, riders, and overall operations. The software allows businesses to generate highly efficient and optimal routes for deliveries intelligently, thereby reducing the inefficiencies resulting from idling, empty miles, and deviation in driver behavior. 

Let’s explore how businesses can choose the best delivery route planning software in USA and how they can benefit from the same. 

Challenges in Manual or Conventional Delivery Route Planning

#1 – Reliance on Manual Elements

Traditional methods of planning delivery routes rely on manual effort. Route planners devote numerous hours daily to mapping out routes using physical maps. However, this approach is not entirely accurate, as it often overlooks various factors such as service times, route distances, preferred delivery windows for customers, and traffic patterns. The accuracy of these plans diminishes further when faced with increased demand.

This inaccuracy directly affects last-mile logistics, resulting in drivers struggling to complete deliveries on schedule. Consequently, customers may experience subpar service, and additional logistics expenses may arise from delivery partners having to make multiple attempts to complete missed deliveries.

#2 – Lack of Real-Time Visibility

Traditional route planning does not provide real-time insights into the location or status of shipments. As a result, businesses are often uninformed about the exact whereabouts of their deliveries. This lack of information makes it difficult for businesses to respond promptly and effectively to incidents such as accidents, traffic congestion, or other obstacles or to verify the reasons drivers provide for delayed or unsuccessful deliveries.

The absence of real-time visibility contributes to a subpar customer experience, increased operational expenses, and potential business losses due to inaccurate delivery status updates.

#3 – Higher Operational Costs

Traditional delivery route planning techniques often overlook various factors, such as traffic conditions, vehicle capacity, driver knowledge of the area, and language proficiency. This makes it challenging for businesses to efficiently allocate drivers or vehicles, particularly when the workload grows. This inefficiency results in increased operational costs for fleet managers.

On the other hand, businesses using delivery route planning software solutions in USA can consider all these factors to generate highly efficient routes, thereby reducing miles traveled and reducing delivery costs.

#4 – Poor Asset Utilization

Manual route planners do not have access to analytical data or real-time updates. Consequently, they might randomly assign last-minute orders to new drivers instead of allocating them to drivers already servicing the same area, resulting in multiple drivers operating within the same region.

Furthermore, they struggle to efficiently assess factors such as vehicle capacity and driver availability during the planning process. This inefficiency leads to the under-utilization of resources, ultimately contributing to increased overall logistics expenses.

#5 – ETA SLA Breaches

Manual routing is not only inefficient but also fails to account for real-time dynamic events like traffic congestion, combining multiple orders, organizing multi-stop deliveries, and grouping orders en route. These shortcomings lead to extended delivery times, difficulty in scaling order deliveries, and breaches of ETA SLAs. 

As customers are unable to get proactive real-time insights into order movements and reschedule their deliveries, the odds of delivery failure increase, and businesses have to make re-attempts, which leads to increased delivery costs.

Importance of Using Delivery Route Planning Software in USA

The USA road logistics is a massive ecosystem that comprises diverse industries and almost all types of markets. Some common examples include agriculture, manufacturing, long haul, cold chain, oil & gas, mining & quarrying, fishing, retail, and more. What makes the scene even more promising is the fact that both containerized and non-containerized freight, as well as full truckload or FTL shipments, have massive market share. 

A research report by Technavio predicts the last mile delivery segment in the USA to grow by USD 62.71 million by 2027, and a strong focus on technological advances is the primary trend in the market. 

The business adoption of technological advances for real-time tracking, secure deliveries, flexible delivery scheduling, and mobile-based order management is gaining momentum. 

Now, companies offering advanced delivery route planning software in US offer all these functionalities apart from dynamic order clubbing, automated order allocation, and real-time driver management, which empowers businesses with crucial capabilities

How Can Businesses Benefit From Delivery Route Planning Software in USA?

#1 – Automated Order Allocation

One of the most amazing benefits that businesses can unlock by using software for delivery planning in the USA is automated order allocation. The software comes with in-built intelligent algorithms that match appropriate riders with every order keeping multiple rules in mind, such as prioritizing a dedicated fleet over freelance riders and working efficiently with the floating fleet as well.  

Every order allocation is done keeping custom routing constraints in mind, which can be set and configured by the businesses as and when required. This allows highly efficient and profitable order and rider pairings, thereby reducing delivery costs.

#2 – Optimized Delivery Routing

The shortest paths from the origin/store/hub/warehouse to the destination may not always be the most optimized routes. This is because they might not be planned as per the constraints such as delivery area restrictions, order type, vehicle make, rider type, etc.

Businesses using delivery route planning software in USA can ensure that all such constraints are followed apart from other critical factors, such as road disruptions and multiple delivery stops. The software allows businesses to club multiple orders en route and generate alternative routes in case of roadblocks etc. 

#3 – Increased Asset Utilization

AI-powered delivery routing software solutions come with smart algorithms for increasing asset and resource utilization. They can help managers match consignments with the right vehicles based on multiple vehicle and consignment characteristics, such as load type, consignment weight/volume/height, vehicle make, geographic location, and civic restrictions. 

Thus, businesses can manage deliveries for FTL/PTL shipments efficiently, reduce the vehicle leasing costs by increasing the number of orders delivered per trip and also reduce delivery costs by ensuring real-time shipment tracking.

#4 – Improved Customer Experience

Businesses using Intelligent delivery route planning software in USA can monitor fleet movements in real-time. Thus, they can ensure that shipments are progressing as planned, leading to timely deliveries. Further, intelligent delivery route planning solutions like Shipsy offer real-time updates and alerts for order movements, order tracking, driver information, and delivery ETAs. These alerts can be triggered and sent automatically to multiple relevant stakeholders based on the key milestone events. 

This helps reduce customer query calls, keeps them informed about the latest shipment updates, and increases first-attempt deliveries, thereby elevating the CX.

#5 – Reduced Transportation Costs

Using delivery route planning software helps reduce the total distance traveled and bypass real-time obstacles, such as roadblocks, traffic jams, etc., effectively reducing the time lost in transit. This re-routing ensures greater SLA adherence without compromising the custom optimization criteria set by the managers, thereby keeping the delivery costs low.

Moreover, AI/ML-powered algorithms help reduce overall miles traveled by reducing the number of trips, increasing vehicle capacity utilization, and eliminating delivery failures. 

#6 – Data Analytics and Reporting

Top delivery route planning software in USA comes with in-built advanced data analytics and reporting capabilities that enable businesses to derive actionable insights from organizational and field operations data. These solutions help businesses analyze the data in a no-code format and create highly consumable reports with rich data visualizations. Thus, businesses can check the individual performance of riders and logistics partners and make highly strategic business decisions based on reliable and fresh data insights.

#7 – Unified Management 

Delivery planning software solutions offer integrated dashboard-based operations management, and businesses can check all the logistical components related to orders, deliveries, and logistics partners in one place. They can check crucial delivery metrics, such as the number of orders completed on time, delayed deliveries, riders who marked the highest numbers of timely deliveries, and more. 

Further, these solutions can seamlessly integrate across the existing tech infrastructure, such as OMS and WMS, to offer comprehensive operational management via a single dashboard. 

Partner With Shipsy: AI-Powered Delivery Route Planning Software in USA

Shipsy’s end-to-end AI-powered delivery route planning and optimization software is a one-stop solution for all your delivery planning and management needs. Businesses can effectively optimize vehicle capacity, ensure intelligent route planning, manage fleet movements, make last-mile operations efficient, and track all the shipments effortlessly using a single dashboard. 

With all these amazing features, businesses can unlock:

  • 12% reduction in transportation costs
  • 31% increase in vehicle capacity utilization
  • 18% savings in route planning and optimization time

With its ability to offer complete customization and end-to-end logistics management, Shipsy emerges as one of the excellent choices for delivery routing and management. For deeper insights into how Shipsy works and how you can transform delivery routing with its smart capabilities, please schedule a customized free demo now!

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