When you think of routing, the tendency is to think of shipping packages from one location to another. This simplified view, however, is far from the only instance that can benefit from efficient routing. Now more than ever, businesses are coming to realize that they need to rethink how they are routing their people, packages, and services.
If your business involves sales representatives with specific territories, home health services, service call visits, regular inspection of equipment on-site, or even moving manufactured goods to a central warehouse, you stand to benefit greatly from route optimization. Every business has its own set of parameters for how it defines the “best route,” with different use cases prioritizing factors like drive time, number of trips, fuel usage, or other factors. As a result, you need a solution that provides you with the flexibility to adapt to your business’s unique set of constraints and requirements.
Account for Numerous Constraints Without a Second Thought
Sales representatives with specific territories need to visit clients on a regular basis, so it’s imperative to make the most of their time in the field. Optimized routes will minimize drive time and miles driven, allowing your reps to spend more of their time focusing on tasks that drive revenue for your business rather than wasting more time traveling. By making your sales reps’ jobs easier and reducing the time they spend driving, you not only give them more time to focus on customer services but also create a work environment that boosts employee morale—an often overlooked yet nonetheless invaluable benefit.
If your business is built around visiting residential or commercial buildings to perform a service call, home health visit, or scheduled maintenance, maximizing the number of visits completed each day is likely a top priority. Beyond optimizing schedules and routes to accommodate as many visits as possible, businesses with employees in the field frequently need to prioritize certain accounts or stops, particularly when it’s necessary to accommodate customer requests or availability windows. Planning around all of these specifications can be a daunting and time-consuming task. Comprehensive route optimization not only plans the most efficient routes but also takes all of these requirements into account.
Transporting goods from your manufacturing facility to your warehouse is a fairly straightforward concept, but there are a number of constraints that need to be considered for things to go smoothly. In this scenario, you need to look beyond the origin and destination and take other factors into account, such as the load capacity of your trucks, the handling requirements—such as refrigeration or sideloading—of your cargo, and whether your drivers need any special licenses or qualifications to transport the cargo in question. With a sophisticated routing solution, you can automatically factor in all of your driver and vehicle capabilities to ensure that deliveries are assigned to appropriate drivers and vehicles without sacrificing speed or efficiency.
Similarly, businesses that provide services to their customers in the field will need to account for their technicians’ expertise when assigning jobs to different routes. When managing a field service operation, it can be labor-intensive to schedule jobs against a team of technicians with different experience levels and skill sets to ensure jobs are assigned to the technicians who can perform them best. This becomes even more complicated if different vehicles are equipped with unique tools or equipment. A true route optimization solution not only generates routes to cover more visits each day but also matches the right technician to the right job to lower operating costs. This issue is a crucial one when considering different route planning options for your business.
The dynamic nature of routing does make route planning inherently complicated, but implementing a routing engine directly into your existing software makes the process simple. Click here to learn more about the benefits of integrating WorkWave Routing Engine into your current business software.
