Data is critical for any business operations. Whether it’s to identify areas of opportunity or flag potential issues, you can make strategic decisions once you dig into KPI metrics.
For last mile delivery or service businesses, your defined KPI metrics should reveal your fleet’s and drivers’ performance — because they directly impact your customer satisfaction levels and operational efficiency.
How do you access these types of metrics? You’ll need a route planning tool, like Route Manager, that collects real-time data and compares the planned vs. actual results.
Let’s review some of the metrics Route Manager unlocks with its Analytics Dashboard:
- Overview
- Performance
Fleet Overview
The Overview dashboard gives you quick insight into how you are utilizing your current resources. We’ll make it easy for you to see if you are loading your vehicles and drivers’ schedules to capacity — without ever opening an Excel sheet.
Overview metrics:
- Total vehicles, average daily vehicles, total km/miles planned, average daily km/miles planned displays the time period’s available vehicles and distance planned.
- Review your vehicle usage by load and time to see how you are planning your available resources. Route Manager will also indicate your maximum, minimum and average usage. If you are delivering goods – review these metrics to make sure you aren’t wasting space on vehicles.
- Unplanned time window violations report the amount of times your drivers arrived outside of the approved plan. Keep an eye on this metric, it relates to your customer’s experience and can indicate an issue with your plans or drivers.
Driver Performance
Once you have an understanding of your overall fleet, review the execution of your routes through the Performance dashboard. Here you can measure your drivers’ productivity and begin to identify trends to improve future plans.
Performance metrics:
- Breakdown the time spent at orders by: planned, reported and detected to see the average length of each stop compared to what you anticipated. If the data isn’t matching up, you might want to adjust your plan for traffic, add more time to your stops, or learn if certain orders/customers impact your plan.
- Get an indication into driver accountability by reviewing deviations from the plan and unplanned idle time. Speak with your drivers to get to the bottom of the issue.
- If your plans are dependant on time-windows, delays on planned arrival and delays on reported departure are worth monitoring.
Here are some ways you can improve your routes after reviewing your Analytics Dashboard:
- Adjust your time-windows if your drivers are consistently spending more/less time at stops.
- Monitor idle time and deviations from the plan to coach drivers who may be steering away from the approved plan.
- Prepare for your busy season based on last year’s metrics to learn what resources you need to keep up.
- Identify gaps within your plans and evaluate performance so that you can increase efficiency.
