Optimized scheduling and effective route planning are essential for an enterprise involved in the space of first and last mile delivery or having a type of delivery operation. 2020 has been challenging for our business, and conserving cash has become the new normal. Teams across enterprises are trying to identify cash leaking holes and fill them. The other way to conserve cash is to optimize business operations.
Leveraging a route planning and scheduling software will take in to account relevant customer preferences and constraints to
- optimize field operations and improve productivity
- optimal distribution of orders to available vehicles
- suggest the best sequence of stops
- calculate optimized driving routes
What is Scheduling and Route Planning?
Route scheduling is a process to align every individual with tasks or actions best suited for ultimate goals. We can use scheduling and route planning individually or company-wide to focus on high-priority tasks, meetings, or deliveries.
A delivery organization can save a lot of money and effort while optimizing its operations. It can achieve maximum delivery in the minimum traveled distance, reducing delivery costs.
We work hard on our schedule optimizations in our daily personal lives without realizing that this is core to our DNA. Today, several technologies are available to implement scheduling and route planning in organizations resulting in increased efficiency. It’s easy to apply once you understand how it works; organizations can choose a forward or backward scheduling strategy based on their current mode of operation, both in some cases.
Benefits of Scheduling and Route Planning
- Increased revenue
- Increased overall process efficiency
- High SLA compliances
- Engaged workforce
- Reduce transport and fuel costs
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Optimized delivery routes
What is the Distinction Between Routing and Scheduling?
There is a key difference between scheduling and routing. Scheduling can be defined as the method to plan time intervals for delivery executives to make assigned deliveries. Routing refers to mapping routes for delivery agents or field executives to ensure the deliveries mentioned above happen on time. The idea is to use roads that are either the shortest or the fastest.
Looking at them closely will give us a better idea of the difference. Collating all delivery or service requests, determining how many vehicles or staff members you would need to address these, and assigning them to agents at specific time intervals will be scheduling. Scheduling is imperative to ensure your field operations are meticulously planned and executed. It precedes routing and is necessary to manage workloads and staffing needs.
Routing or route planning essentially mapping out optimum routes for delivery based on your scheduling. The quickest or shortest paths will ensure delivery times and customer delight. Routing is crucial when you need to plan for vehicle capacities, transportation costs, and time.
Five Steps to Optimize Schedule and Route Planning:
1) Prioritize
Before you start thinking about where to start, we need to set a target. Either I am looking for cost savings on deliveries, or I want to improve the delivery timeline. It’s better to have one goal at a time for better results. In some cases, you can aim for more than one target simultaneously.
2) Identify Constraints/Variables
It is essential to factor in most of the variables we might get during our execution.
- What are the urgent tasks?
- Do we need a particular skill to complete the job?
- What is the capacity we can consider?
- Can we group a few of the tasks?
All the above questions will be your constraints while you plan your schedule. We also need to segregate our constraints into resource constraints and task constraints.
3) Plan
While starting the planning exercise, we need to keep priority tasks first to help move one step closer to the target. Once you have planned all the critical tasks, you should consider the remaining and segregate them into urgent vs. low-priority tasks. Repeat this till you complete all your tasks.
4) Review
Several real-time constraints can pop up when you start your day as per the optimized schedule. A classic example of a delivery use case could be one of the delivery agents is on emergency leave. To meet all SLAs, we need to replicate the same and optimize with the current resources at your disposal.
The review is one of the most critical steps in scheduling and route optimization because a lot can change real-world dynamics.
5) Execute
Send the optimized schedule to your resources and feel the power of optimized workflow.
How Dista Helps Organizations with Scheduling & Route Planning
At Dista, we help organizations with optimized deliveries, pickups, reverse pickups, sales, and services schedules for their mobile workforce. This includes use cases from industries like logistics, food delivery, quick service restaurants, ride-hailing, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, e-commerce, retail, FMCG/FMCD, telecom, banking, insurance, and other financial institutes.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how Dista helps businesses with their scheduling and route planning.
1) Priorities
Dista helps in achieving key targets like –
- Reducing overall cost
- Variable workforce management
- Increase profit/revenue
- Workload management
- Saving time
2) Identify Constraints and Variables
Businesses need to upload (API integrations) the order master into the Dista platform with all the mobile workforce’s input constraints, capacity, and skills. You can also add service or delivery level constraints or specifications that can be used instantly or at any event trigger. Dista is a highly customizable platform, and we can add any constraints that suit your business requirements.
A few out of the box constraints that we address
3) Plan
With Dista, you can get the optimized schedule with a planned route for a day, week, month, or year, depending on how far you want to plan your workforce.
Our robust system offers a job timeline view to make it easy for you to see which mobile workforce is on what schedule on which day of the week. With the asset timeline drag and drop feature, you can rebalance the workload if anyone is on emergency leave.
Dista also has a summary view to show the status of jobs in real-time. The contextual Nudges framework by Dista, along with the notification framework, helps send nudges to the mobile workforce for any missed SLAs or deadlines.
4) Review
After you have generated your plan, you can view the schedule and make changes as and when needed, with manual override, or change constraints and rerun the optimization and compare the two plans. Dista helps dispatchers or fleet managers modify the time and day when you need an additional mobile workforce to complete the order volumes and vice versa.
5) Execute
Dista will automatically share the jobs to the respective mobile workforce through the Dista mobile application (iOS and Android). Jobs are displayed in a sequence, and any workflow can be added with the jobs to be filled at the time of delivery. If you want to make changes after the job has been assigned to your mobile workforce, we help you with dynamic scheduling and load balancing.
Optimize your Scheduling and Route Planning with Dista
Scheduling and route planning results in higher operational efficiency. Are you looking to streamline and automate your scheduling and route planning? Get in touch with us for a quick demo.
