Dynamic Route Planning: Everything You Need To Know

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Dynamic Route Planning: Everything You Need To Know

Route planning is crucial for improving the delivery experience and business profitability. It ensures the timely and cost-efficient movement of goods from source to destination. Well-planned and optimized routes can help businesses to cut down on 20% of their fleet while scaling up their services. Route planning can be static or dynamic. Static route planning includes delivering orders via pre-configured routes and the number of stops. It means the driver follows a fixed delivery route irrespective of the delivery volume and order mix. On the other hand, dynamic route planning offers the flexibility to optimize routes as per the new circumstances while ensuring complete efficiency and business profitability. Let’s learn more about dynamic route planning.

What is dynamic route planning?

Dynamic route planning is the process of accommodating any last-minute customer request in the orders that are already scheduled for delivery. It creates delivery routes and stop sequences considering the customer and order mix. The prime aim of dynamic route planning is to ensure orders are delivered using optimal and cost-effective delivery routes. Dynamic route planning can be achieved by implementing an advanced route planning and optimization solution. 

It is performed:

  • If an order is scheduled for delivery and the system receives a new order that needs to be delivered on the same delivery route. The route planning software intelligently clubs the new order with the ones that are planned for delivery.
  • If a driver has to deliver multiple orders, say five, and one of the customers cancels the order or reschedules the delivery. The route planning and optimization software immediately alerts the driver and generates a new delivery route to save the driver’s time and effort.
  • If a customer raises a return request.
  • In case of uncertain events like sudden road closure or inclement weather.

Static Route Planning Vs. Dynamic Route Planning 

Check out the key differences between static and dynamic route planning below:

The Significance of Dynamic Route Planning

Traditional route planning practices cannot work in today’s times, where same-day delivery and next-day delivery have become the standard norm. Such an approach can also lead to inefficient route planning, lack of real-time tracking, poor driver’s performance, increased transportation costs, and various other problems.

Dynamic route planning is an effective solution and the need of the hour to overcome all these challenges and enhance customer experience. It improves fleet productivity while keeping the operational cost low. Moreover, it also maximizes the delivery capacity, the number of orders delivered and profits generated per route.

9 Major Benefits of Dynamic Route Planning 

Dynamic route planning helps to cope with the increasing demand for shorter turnaround times while improving customer experience. However, these two are not the only benefits of dynamic route planning. Some other advantages are:

Saves Time

Dynamic route planning saves a significant amount of time by minimizing manual intervention and intelligently clubbing orders. It also reduces the chances of errors that can occur with manual planning delivery routes or making changes to the already planned routes.

Reduces Costs

Imagine you, as a logistics manager, have planned to deliver five orders in one trip towards a particular destination. At the last moment, you receive a new order that can be easily delivered by the same driver on the same delivery route. Dynamic route planning accommodates such last-minute requests and avoids using additional resources, which adds up to the delivery costs. Similarly, when a customer cancels the order while it is already out for delivery, dynamic route planning re-routes the driver to prevent a failed delivery attempt and reduce fuel consumption.

Improves Drivers’ Productivity

Dynamic route planning ensures that the drivers follow the shortest possible delivery route and deliver as many packages as possible in one trip. Faster trip completion delights customers and improves drivers’ productivity.

Prevents Idling of Engines

Dynamic route planning software immediately generates new routes in case of unexpected or unpredicted events such as road closures or sudden downpours. Re-routing is also done to accommodate new deliveries or return requests. It also helps to avoid traffic congestion and prevents the idling of engines.

Increases Business Profitability

By reducing delivery costs, improving customer experience, and minimizing the usage of resources, dynamic routing contributes to increasing business profitability. It also minimizes vehicle idling time by immediately generating a new route in case of bad weather, traffic congestion, road closure, or any other unpredicted circumstance.

Accommodates Return Requests

Generally, when a customer raises a return request, the system assigns a driver and selects a vehicle to facilitate return pick-up. Dynamic route planning prevents creating this journey by assigning pickups to the fleet returning empty after deliveries.

Contributes To Reducing CO2 Emission

Dynamic route planning accommodates last-minute customer requests as well as other changes in the delivery schedule to maximize the number of deliveries per trip, optimizes the delivery routes, and reduces empty miles, which contributes to shrinking carbon footprints. 

Intelligent Resource Utilization

It utilizes a vehicle’s capacity completely and designs more efficient delivery routes for all drivers to reduce miles driven and help a company save both time and resources. 

Accurate ETAs

Dynamic route planning facilitates all the stakeholders to check the updated status of the consignment with precise delivery ETAs. Even when a new route is generated due to any reason, ETAs are immediately updated, and a message about the same is sent to customers via SMS/Email/WhatsApp.

How to implement dynamic route planning?

For dynamic route planning, businesses can invest in reliable route planning and optimization software. Once integrated, the software uses this feature to optimize delivery routes and ensure all deliveries are done at the right time and at the minimum cost possible. Such software uses complex algorithms and considers multiple parameters like the type and weight of the consignment, type and capacity of the vehicle, delivery time, driver’s skills/experience, delivery location, and the number of stops to plan the most optimal route for deliveries.

Moreover, these algorithms also improve fleet efficiency and accelerate deliveries to boost customer experience and empower businesses to manage on-demand orders proficiently. The software also facilitates real-time tracking to update all stakeholders with the status of the orders.

How to choose the best dynamic route planning software?

Dynamic route planning comes as a part of advanced route planning and optimization software, and to find the best one, look for the following:

  • Easy integration with your existing ERP/OMS
  • Customization and scalability 
  • Real-time tracking
  • Real-time delivery alerts 
  • Driver app
  • Data and analytics
  • Multi-stop route planning

Also, make sure that the route planning and optimization software provider offers round-the-clock support services. Ask for a demo to understand the software’s features and functionalities.

How Shipsy Can Help

Shipsy’s AI-enabled route planning and optimization software facilitates intelligent delivery route planning and efficient fleet management. It enables fleet managers to track, monitor and control all aspects of routing from a single dashboard. The software takes into account multiple constraints to generate the most optimal delivery routes and help businesses have access to a host of advantages:

  • 31% increasing in vehicle capacity utilization
  • 24% increase in DPV (deliveries per vehicle)
  • 12% decrease in the overall transportation costs
  • 18% savings in route planning and optimization time

Request for a custom demo today!

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