The trip planning tools in Maptitude identify optimal routes for
travel and deliveries among waypoints, calculate the distances between destinations, and produce driving directions.
What are the key features of delivery optimisation software?
Several key features of the Maptitude delivery route planner include:
- Easy to use fleet route planning software
- Allows for manually editing routes by dragging the path to new destinations
- Can prioritise travel over highways, allowing for faster routing over long distances
- Can create a turn-by-turn directions report for your delivery drivers
- Support for nationwide trip planning to an unlimited number of destinations
- Multiple optimised routes in a single map
- Determines time and fuel costs
- Extensive route planning tools
- Includes a comprehensive suite of other business mapping software tools
Best United Kingdom delivery mapping software
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How do you optimise delivery routes?
When a trip involves many different stops, Maptitude helps you
decide the best order to visit them. Most importantly, Maptitude
lets you choose what type of route you want:
- The shortest route
- The fastest route
- The ordered route (when visits or deliveries must be conducted sequentially)
- The route that returns to the origin
- The route that you interactively modify
Best United Kingdom route planning software
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“We
have found Maptitude to be a really useful piece of
software. It allows us to quickly and easily represent
various data geographically, and the ease of functionality
and ability to layer data makes it really user friendly. It
has, among other things, helped us develop our
sector-leading delivery service and understand areas that
require focus from our sales teams.”
| |
Richard Horton
Transportation Development & Planning Manager, Travis Perkins
Northampton, United Kingdom |
|
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“Caliper produces the inexpensive Maptitude desktop GIS package which has
extensive GIS-Transportation functionality.”
| | Prof. Nigel Waters
Calgary, Alberta |
|
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Example:
One of the big issues you face, especially if you are a
delivery service, is ensuring efficient fleet management
to stay competitive. Even small reductions in
transportation time or cost can add up to big savings
for your company. Your delivery drivers may make
multiple deliveries per shift, where each destination
has varying stop times, may require rest stops, and
based on vehicle type has varying speed constraints and
fuel costs. Maptitude can handle these scenarios for you
and uses sophisticated algorithms that ensure that your
vehicles take the most time-efficient and
energy-efficient routes while making multiple
deliveries.
Vehicle routing with time windows, vehicle constraints, multiple depots, route length constraints, and mixed pickup and delivery
What is the best software to optimise delivery routes?
The best route can mean different things to different people.
Often the efficient route is the one that is the fastest, while others
prefer the path that is shortest in terms of mileage, or a trip that
maximises use of highways, or avoids population centers:
- A salesperson might want to set up an itinerary for less driving time and more time with customers
- A chemical company transporting hazardous chemicals may want to uses roads that avoid areas where many people live or work
Maptitude is the best routing software for meeting all of the
demands listed above, and uses an accurate and up-to-date street
database. Maptitude routing and scheduling software handles one-way streets, and supports
display of these on the map.
You can easily get started planning your route by simply clicking
in a map on all the places you want to visit. You can also locate
stops by typing an address, or automatically by using multiple addresses in
an Excel spreadsheet or in any other table or database. If you have
a point layer of your customers, you could select the customers you
want to visit and then have Maptitude determine the best route to
use to visit them.
There are also
additional best route tools that allow you to:
Maptitude routing software Route Manager
Examples of optimisation of delivery routes
Planning your delivery routes for anything from food delivery to service calls requires robust analytics.
This case study is one example of how such tools provide tangible business benefits.
Nine Tips to Improve Your Delivery Routes
- Free online directions tools are generally not well
suited for business and delivery company routing problems.
- You may be able to use free tools to optimise a single
list of addresses, but you will likely have to manually type
the locations into the tool.
- A mapping software or geographic information system
(GIS) such as Maptitude can perform the same tasks as the
free tools but can also automatically map lists of locations
from a spreadsheet and handle multiple routes.
- Multiple-vehicle, multiple-stop optimisation requires a
sophisticated logistics solution such as Maptitude.
Maptitude can model trips either singly or optimise across a
vehicle fleet to ensure the most efficient allocation of
resources.
- You will need an operations and logistics application,
not a simple "directions" application, when you require more
sophisticated options such as:
- Multiple vehicle fleets
- Varying start and end times for different drivers
- Scheduled delivery times by customer
- Varying demand in terms of product volume to be
delivered to each customer
- Multiple start and end locations for each driver
- Drop-offs as well as pickups
- Long-haul routes that can extend overnight
- Requirements for driver rest periods
- Variable speeds that different vehicles can travel and
over different types of roads
- Varying times spent at each stop
- Whether you need to track toll and fuel costs
- Specifying the flexibility you have in meeting scheduled
arrival and departure times
- Consider driving schedules. You may want to
prevent creating overnight stops where an unfinished route
is assumed to resume the next day. You can do this by
looking at what could reasonably be the last stop of the day
and choosing an amount of time you are willing to allow
drivers to continue each day.
- Consider time to spend at each stop. Itineraries need to
make reasonable assumptions about how long on average a
delivery driver stays at each stop. For most applications
you need to avoid applications that allow no time for stop
duration, because they assume you are just driving past each
location! When you know the variable time to spend at each
location that is even more valuable in determining accurate
routes. This may be based on factors such as number or type
of deliveries at each site or a predetermined visit length.
- Build in rest time. Accurately specifying the length and
frequency of rests, and choosing whether the frequency is
based on total route time or just driving time, are critical
factors to consider when scheduling routes.
- Choose whether to calculate driving costs based on
either fuel (based on price and consumption) or a flat rate
per mile is another way to manage routes. Often it is
important to minimise actual monetary costs per route, in
addition to determining the most efficient directions.
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