What Are Truck Route Planners
Truck route planner, also known as commercial route planning, is a skilled process that requires a lot of knowledge about the roads, restrictions, and traffic. Truck route planner is a more specialized route optimization process than conventional route planning. This process takes into consideration road blocks, traffic lights, stops, and rush hour traffic.
Apart from road factors, this process takes into consideration the vehicle's varying capacity, loading capacity, and truck-restricted roads. Ignoring these important factors when planning your routes may result in fines for breaking road regulations.
Truck route planning is usually begun in advance, way before the final orders come in. The process is long and time-consuming with a change in plans causing a Domino effect on the truck delivery schedule.
Importance Of Truck Route Planning
Truck route planning is the process of finding the best routes specifically for commercial motor vehicles for every delivery truck driver for each delivery. While the shortest distance is a part of the journey optimization, it is not the most important criterion. Trucking route planner prioritizes delivery speed and cost-effectiveness. That means taking a longer route if it has less traffic and fewer stops.
Properly planning truck routes before delivery begins helps cut down driving time for each driver assignment. This means less fuel burnt, fewer overworked drivers, and overall cost-effectiveness.
How To Plan Truck Routes
Planning truck routes requires more than manual tuck planners. Using manual planners leaves a lot of factors to chance and makes room for human error. You won't also be able to trace deliveries and factor in real-time limitations like temporary roadblocks and traffic.
- Truck Routing Software: To properly plan truck routes you need truck routing software. In this software, you can trace the vehicles on a truck route map, and account for weight and height restrictions, traffic restrictions, and road constraints. This is to prevent breaking road regulations which could result in fines or worse legal consequences.
- Pick A Software That Fits Your Requirements: To properly optimize a truck route you need to pick software that is designed to take into account the best cost-efficient and time-saving ways to reach numerous stops and deliveries. It should be able to account for restrictions on weight, width, height and length, low clearance elements, and various road types with paid toll highways or roads, tunnels, etc.
- Input Addresses: Add the customers' shipping addresses to optimize the roads and routes. The software gathers the drop-off points through spreadsheets, scanned documents, cloud storage, web file transfer tools, copy-paste, manual input, etc.
- Select Your Preferred Type Of Optimization: You can select the best type of optimization for your business and routes.
- Add Optimization Restraints: You can plan your routes with your preferred restraints to match your customers' needs and your business requirements. For example, you could add time windows, maximum stops per route, order priority, etc.
Conclusion
Truck route planning is more complicated than regular route planning. More factors as considered and more time goes into it. Things like weight, height, road constraints, and carrying capacity are considered when mapping out the routes for commercial motor vehicles.
