6 Tips for Successful Delivery Route Planning: How to Plan and Optimize Deliveries

When your business operations involve delivering products to customers, you need to ensure the delivery process runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible. That begins with planning. 

Here are six helpful tips to help you plan and optimize your deliveries.

1. Use a Route Planning App

 If your company is still using manual planning tools like pen and paper or spreadsheets, you need to get with the times. A manual approach is time-consuming, can cause errors, and makes it difficult to scale operations.

On the other hand, using advanced routing software alleviates such problems and comes with plenty of benefits. When a route planning app is used to plan and run all of your deliveries, you can find the best routes, predict traffic problems in real-time, keep up with the latest weather conditions, and much more.

Check out these best delivery route planner apps to find the best one for your company. You won’t regret it.

2. Consider More Than Just the Time it Takes to Drive a Route

While it’s much easier to create smooth delivery route plans when you use a dedicated app, you still need to think about all those things that contribute to the delivery service running to its optimum performance. 

ittle things could be overlooked. For instance, you need to account for different variables that affect delivery times, not just focus on how long journey times are. Drivers must be given sufficient time to unload items, enter buildings, complete paperwork, and so on

 Service time must be included in your delivery time calculations to make sure the delivery times are realistic and everything runs smoothly.

3. Choose Strategic Transshipment Points

Having transshipment points is essential for most delivery services. You can enhance the efficiency of your operations if those transshipment points are planned well. Consider the locations of the points carefully to find out which locations are impractical and which provide the optimal opportunities.

4. Consider Small Details to Optimize Your Delivery Route Plan

You need to find optimal delivery routes if you want your deliveries to run on time and error-free, but that goes beyond simply finding the shortest routes.

You need to know how long routes take at different times of day, as a route could take a lot longer during rush hour.

You also need to look at whether there are ways of cutting down route times further or if you can meet delivery windows consistently. By considering each detail, you can create the most successful delivery route plan.

5. Choose the Delivery Options That Work Best for Your Company

While you certainly have the opportunity of growing your business and creating loyal and happy customers by offering a wide variety of delivery options, such as same day, next day, and morning or afternoon options, providing all of those options isn’t always a good idea.

Determine which delivery options you should provide for customers by examining your infrastructure and working out which options make the most financial and practical sense. Make cost optimization your priority and you will soon be able to discern whether providing more delivery options is worth it.

6. Collect and Analyze Data to Improve Your Delivery Service

You should continually monitor your delivery operations to identify any issues and look for ways for improvement. It’s easy to do that when you use delivery route software because you have all of the information at your fingertips.

Make sure you collect and analyze data so you can learn and make any changes to alleviate problems. For example, if there’s always a delay at the start of one route, you can quickly figure out what is causing that delay and take steps to solve it.