-
Best way to plan routes with lots of stops?
We’ve been doing furniture deliveries for a while now and the number of orders has started getting a bit out of hand. Right now dispatching is basically done in a spreadsheet and every morning somebody sits there trying to figure out which driver should take which jobs and in what order. It worked when we had a handful of deliveries a day, but now we’re regularly dealing with dozens of stops and changing requests. What are people using these days to plan routes with a lot of stops without spending half the morning doing it manually?
-
2 Replies
-
The order stops happen in actually matters way less than people think, most delivery problems come from how a route handles last minute changes, not the initial plan itself. A driver running behind or a customer rescheduling shouldn’t mean redoing everyone else’s day too, but that’s exactly what happens with hand dispatching since one change cascades into rebuilding the whole sheet. The operations that scale past a handful of stops usually aren’t the ones with the smartest initial routing, they’re the ones where changes get absorbed without blowing up everyone else’s day.
-
With furniture the loading order matters just as much as the driving order, whatever gets stacked in last needs to come off first, and that’s only possible to plan ahead if you actually know the stop order before the truck gets loaded, not after. That’s where having something map out the sequence ahead of time actually pays off. There’s an unlimited stops route planner here: https://routing24.com/ . It locks in the sequence automatically no matter how many deliveries get added or moved around during the day. Drivers get updated routes in real time too, so the team loading the truck knows the order in advance instead of guessing it in the morning.