The Advantage
Hand-ordering gets worse the longer the route.
Thirty stops is already awkward to sequence by hand. Sixty is guesswork with a
clipboard. Every stop you add multiplies the orders you would have to weigh against each
other, and the day keeps moving while you do it. The bars show the on-time rate for each
route in the comparison, as it was submitted and after reordering.
The cost side moves further than most people expect, and it moves on two fronts at once.
Take the first real sheet above. Reordered, the same thirty-two deliveries cover 146 km
instead of 208, and the time the driver spends waiting for a window to open falls from
three hours to half an hour. The paid day goes from 12h 21m to 8h 34m. Nothing was
dropped and nothing was rushed. The stops were visited in a better order, and that was
the whole intervention.
Which of the two gives back more depends on how full the day is. On that sheet it is the
waiting, about two thirds of the hours recovered, because the driver kept arriving before
the window opened and standing there. On the 59-stop sheet beside it the day was
over-subscribed and there was no waiting left to take out, so five sixths of the saving
came from the driving instead: 424 km down to 187. A driver costs more per hour than the
van costs per kilometre, so payroll is the larger line on the first sheet and the two are
level on the second. The hours are what you are buying. The litres come with them.
Send up to ten routes in one request and they get planned together.