How Can You Get More Effective Daily Routes?

Have you heard ORTEC Tactical Routing (OTR) can streamline your routes, resulting in significant savings? Especially during times of high fuel prices, tight routes can be the difference between profit and loss. While you may have routes that worked a year ago, changes in demand, cost of fuel, delivery time requirements, and other factors should be re-addressed. Enter ORTEC Tactical Routing, or OTR. Using your business rules, you can use OTR to create more effective daily routes.

In a basic OTR scenario, you can account for new fuel costs. Your routes may no longer be optimal due to changes in demand, as well as changes in the number and geography of customers. In OTR, you can take a long-term view of recurring routes and optimize them to reduce miles. Where you have flexibility to dictate when you visit a customer, you can reduce miles by having the correct vehicle in the precise area on any given day. Stem miles – the miles from the origin to the first stop, and from the last stop to the destination, whether depot, distribution center, or even domiciles – can be reduced or even eliminated by reducing routing days. This is particularly true for out-of-town routes.

Another common scenario is determining where to set up a new depot or cross-dock. OTR can tell you the best location, relative to your specific needs, helping you decide between available options.

Since OTR is a modeling tool, you can try out new scenarios in OTR before trying them out with your drivers. Should the number of routes be increased due to increasing business or can the current number of vehicles handle the load? Are there too many routes and should they be reduced? This might be a situation for businesses servicing seasonal customers. OTR can create sets of routes to meet different needs: a seasonal summer time area may need more vehicles during summer and fewer or even none after the summer season ends. You can be ready for the change of seasons instead of reacting.

OTR can create not only the geographic clumps or territories, but also, balance and create daily routes. While most re-routes aim at reducing cost, others have goals in line with company’s business rules. These can include servicing customers on time. Meeting customers’ time windows is often at odds with saving on transportation but they can be an important intangible. OTR will create daily routes that find that sweet spot between reducing costs and giving great customer service.

Over time, territories overlap, reducing effectiveness. New customers are acquired, others leave. The daily router will put those customers in the nearest, best route for the day they ordered.

Sending two vehicles to the same area wastes fuel and time: money! Territories are more effective when they are clustered apart, with no overlap.

With OTR, the territories can be better-clustered.

OTR will also provide information on whether a different number of territories is needed. Or, if there is guidance from the business that more territories should be set up, OTR tackles that as well. For example, for the data above, should you need to increase from 8 to 10 territories, OTR makes this process easy.

Similar changes can be made for different needs. For example, should the work week be reduced? This immediately results in cost savings since stem miles are eliminated for one or more days. Should the work week be extended? Where vehicles are not available but drivers are, and customers are open more days, it could make sense to increase the work week.

OTR has reports that inform you on return on investment for the re-route once it is completed. Other reports can be used to inform transportation, sales, and customers of changes for the visit schedule.

OTR is a fantastic modeling tool. It can do as little as cleaning up routes with no change to territories, all the way to looking at transportation in new perspectives that benefit the company using OTR.