What happens if one of your drivers finishes a delivery route in six hours and has another four hours available in his shift? He returns to the warehouse and does another trip, right?
Well, not necessarily.
What seems obvious, on the surface, can be difficult to manage without the right route scheduling software. Systems with more simplistic algorithms can’t handle the advanced logic of running multiple trips in a single driver shift. As a result, your driver force is less productive and you may end up with more drivers and trucks than you actually need.
That’s a big problem, and here’s why.
Fleet-related costs represent a huge percentage of your total operating costs. Just one new tractor/trailer combo costs about $160,000, and putting a driver behind the wheel will set you back another $86,000 a year, including benefits, according to the National Private Truck Council (NPTC). Looked at another way, the annual cost to operate one truck running 50,000 miles per year is $136,000, based on the NPTC’s average-cost-per-mile of $2.72.
Now more than ever, you need to get the absolute most productivity from your drivers’ available hours.
While it would make life a lot easier for route planners, it’s unrealistic to think that every driver would start at 8am with a full truck and return with an empty truck at the very end of his shift. Trailers have a space and weight capacity and that limitation often allows only a partial day’s deliveries.
Another thing that complicates route scheduling is your customers’ preferred delivery windows. You might have two customers just up the road from each other, but one wants their delivery at 9am and the other at 1 pm. In this case, you wouldn’t want the driver simply killing time between these two deliveries. You’d want him to complete multiple deliveries in between before heading back to complete the 1pm delivery.
Whatever the ideal solution is to maximizing asset utilization, you need software that can handle multi-trip route plans.
Without route scheduling software that can plan multi-trip delivery routes, your drivers decide whether they are going to work at a pace that allows that extra trip. Most times, the incentive is just not there to go the literal extra mile because drivers are largely salaried workers who get paid for hours worked, not for deliveries made.
A pizza delivery guy is a different story. He works mainly for tips. The more deliveries he makes, the more money goes in his pocket, so he delivers as quickly as possible and heads back to base to get loaded up.
Drivers get paid regardless of how efficient the route is, as long as they get the deliveries done. And they can devise some pretty creative ways to delay their return to the warehouse in order to avoid that second load. For instance, we recently heard about a driver who would leave and re-enter the highway at every exit during his return. He managed to add hours to the trip without ever deviating from the route.
Other drivers simply take “the scenic route,” purposely driving three sides of a square to get to a delivery location rather than driving direct and risking an early finish.
Without a route optimization solution that specifically allows for multiple trips per shift, it can be difficult to discourage such behavior.
If your delivery requirements suggest that multi-trip driver shifts are the most efficient route scheduling strategy, your software must enable, not preclude, such a strategy.
But many of the more basic routing software solutions fall short. The problem is at the database level where delivery locations are stored. In such basic systems, a delivery belongs to one particular route. So, in the database, route 1 equals trip 1, period. With more advanced route planning and scheduling software, like Paragon, route 1 can equal trip 1 and trip 2. It’s just a more advanced algorithm that allows more flexibility in the scheduling process, without workarounds.
Bottom line: Paragon’s algorithms allow the possibility of multiple trips within a single driver’s shift. That could mean the difference between scheduling 8 drivers at 10 hours a day rather than 10 drivers at 8 hours a day – all while meeting customers’ delivery requirements.
Could this efficiency-driving capability be a real game changer for your business?
Most Paragon customers operate pretty complex distribution operations. As a result our support and implementation consultants are very experienced in solving problems just like this every day.
Get in touch and speak to one of our team who will be able to help you get the most from implementing route scheduling software.
