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Maptitude Route Mapping Software

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Routing Software

The trip planning tools in Maptitude identify optimal routes for travel and deliveries among waypoints, calculate the distances between destinations, and produce driving directions.


In this article:

What are the key benefits of Maptitude for route planning?

Maptitude is a powerful delivery route planning software that helps companies of all sizes save time and money on their deliveries. With Maptitude you can easily create and optimize multiple routes for your drivers, considering factors such as travel speeds, customer locations, and delivery windows. Maptitude offers a variety of features to help you map your routes and improve your customer service. These include support for:

  • Multiple vehicles, routes, depots, and customers
  • Variable time windows for deliveries and pickups
  • Variable number of operation days from single to multiple-day schedules
  • Multiple vehicle modes that include delivery, pickup, and backhaul
  • Customer settings for order size, whether for delivery or pickup, time to perform deliveries, origin depot, and time windows for when each customer is available
  • Depot time windows for when each facility opens and closes
  • Vehicle type, count, cost, and capacity settings
  • Schedule, rest, and break time settings
  • Route cost reports by distance and time
  • Route balancing options by time, distance, cost, load, number of stops, number of vehicles, number of routes, vehicle shuffling space, and more
  • Reports as PDF or Excel, as map graphics, or as interactive maps on the web with Maptitude Online
Route map with multiple depots
Routes within territories

Benefits of route planning technology:

Cost savings
On average, last-mile delivery accounts for 53% of the total cost of shipping for e-commerce businesses.1 Route planning software can map out the best routes for deliveries, removing the hassle of planning multiple deliveries – the software will automatically calculate the optimal order of the deliveries to maximize time. The use of route optimization software can reduce transportation costs by up to 20% – a significant savings.2

Improved efficiency
After adopting route optimization technology, organizations were able to reduce their route length by 5‐10% on average.3 Taking the time to effectively plan a vehicle's route is a great way to reduce fuel consumption for any vehicle fleet.

Reduced environmental impact
Vehicle rightsizing ensures that the size of a vehicle (or vehicle fleet) corresponds with the characteristics of the scheduled deliveries and pickups. Route optimization software can automatically choose the best vehicles for each trip and can improve fuel efficiency by 40%.4 Fleet rightsizing should always be considered when choosing a vehicle for daily tasks, as well as in the research phase prior to purchasing a new truck or van. Software can also help you model the impacts of different types of vehicles.

Improved customer service
Customer satisfaction can be increased by providing reliable service. For example, time consistency is achieved by using vehicle routing software that supports a maximum difference between the earliest and the latest arrival time at each customer.5

In addition to the above statistics, here are some other benefits of route planning technology:

  • Reduced driver fatigue
  • Improved safety
  • Reduced traffic congestion
  • Increased visibility into operations

Route planning technology is used by a wide range of businesses and individuals, including:

  • Delivery companies
  • Transportation companies
  • Field service companies
  • Sales teams
  • Commuters
  • Travelers
Aimee Barlow

“Using Maptitude to work out the closest members of staff to each store we visit has been incredibly helpful in reducing the travel done by our merchandisers, leading to positive environmental and financial results.”

  Aimee Barlow
Senior Data Analyst, eXPD8 Analytics
Bristol, United Kingdom

What are the key features of delivery optimization 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 prioritize 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 optimized 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 delivery mapping software map showing route that services a number of locations with the minimum driving time

Best delivery mapping software

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How do you optimize delivery routes?

When a trip involves many different stops, Maptitude delivery route planning software helps you optimize daily routes by deciding 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 route mapping software map showing fastest route between locations and waypoints

Best route planning software

Richard Horton

“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
Nigel Waters

“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.

What is the best software to optimize 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 maximizes 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

Maptitude routing software Route Manager

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Modeling Long-Haul Trips

When analyzing long-haul trips, an analyst often wants to model routes that go through the night or that have custom rest times. Maptitude allows you to create overnight routes or routes with no fixed end time. Also, the rest settings support government rules such as those for interstate truck drivers in the USA. Additionally, you can cluster your lists of customers sites that need visiting and optimize a route for each group of destinations.

Maptitude map of customers automatically clustered for route optimization

Cluster your customer sites for route optimization

Multi Route Planning

When you need a multiple route planner, Maptitude helps you optimize each route by deciding which stops should be visited by which driver and vehicle. Maptitude even lets you choose the capacity and types of vehicle, supporting analysts that need:

  • A multi drop route planner software
  • A route planner with unlimited stops
  • A route planner multiple stops
multi drop unlimited stop route planner software application

Vehicle routing with time windows, vehicle constraints, multiple depots, route length constraints, and mixed pickup and delivery

Examples of optimization 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

  1. Free online directions tools are generally not well suited for business and delivery company routing problems.
  2. You may be able to use free tools to optimize a single list of addresses, but you will likely have to manually type the locations into the tool.
  3. 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.
  4. Multiple-vehicle, multiple-stop optimization requires a sophisticated logistics solution such as Maptitude. Maptitude can model trips either singly or optimize across a vehicle fleet to ensure the most efficient allocation of resources.
  5. 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
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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 minimize actual monetary costs per route, in addition to determining the most efficient directions.

Routing, Directions, and Drive Time Videos

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