Making deliveries throughout Australia without optimising the route is like attempting to eat soup with a fork. Technically possible. Deeply inefficient. And at the culmination of it all, somebody is frustrated and there is spilt blood. The geography of the country rewards bad planning in a way the smaller and more compact markets do not. A logistics operator in Brisbane serving South East Queensland can be involved in suburban sprawl, school zone restrictions, bridge height limits all before 10am. Meanwhile, one of the competitors who is servicing outback Queensland is calculating fuel stops, taking the unsealed road conditions into consideration and working around the properties that do not even have conventional street addresses. Both operations are hit when routing decisions are not based on data and are made by instinct. And both gain greatly when an appropriate optimisation engine is employed. If your delivery operations feel chaotic, take a moment to explore www.saphyroo.com/solutions/route-optimisation and discover a smarter way to streamline every route with ease
The difference between a decent route planning tool and one that is actually capable lies in the ability to deal with the gunky, unpredictable texture of actual operations. Consumers cancel at the last moment. Road accidents block roads without any prior notice. One of the refrigerated vehicles is going down and their run should be redistributed by 7am. The software that simply plans a route at the beginning of the day and declares it finished is solving half the problem. The more powerful platforms re-compute on the fly, taking in disturbances and reallocating work loads without having to re-write the entire schedule afresh to the dispatcher. The actual value of operational responsiveness is there – especially in Australian businesses where distances imply that a mid-run hitch can not be simply mendered by walking it back without major cost implications.
The monetary benefit is difficult to dispute after you crunch the real numbers. The Australian diesel prices are a thorn in the flesh of the fleet operators and in most cases fuel constitutes 30-40 percent of overall fleet operating expenses. Optimisation software regularly produces fuel savings of 15 to 25 percent, which at Australian ranges and prices will save huge sums of money annually. A distribution company based in Sydney which operates 25 vehicles might well recoup 100000 or more in annual fuel costs alone – not even counting the overtime savings that come about when drivers can complete routes at the correct time and need not continue rattling through congestive routes before it gets dark. Failed deliveries fall like a rock, and every failed attempt has a reattempt cost that accumulates atrociously on a national operation.