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Are you tired of intuitively managing your business operations and incurring huge costs resulting in very low-profit margins? Optimizing your route planning, scheduling and dispatch are critical for the success of your business operations. Manually planning these processes is a cumbersome process and is prone to errors as well. Automating your processes help you optimize the efficiency of your crew and equipment, enhance the utilization of your equipment, improve your customer service and supercharge your operations.
When you decide to automate your business processes, you’ll find hundreds of solutions addressing your needs. Selecting the right option is not easy. You will struggle to find the missing puzzle piece for your business. But don’t worry; I will guide you to the right solution that will help you optimize your route planning, scheduling, and dispatch process.
The required solution must possess the following capabilities.
A user-friendly interface
What is the purpose of adopting a digital solution that requires more time to troubleshoot problems than actual work? A user-friendly interface would empower your dispatcher to smoothly interact with the platform to create tasks for new assignments, appointments, opportunities, deliveries, and pick-ups. It would reduce the physical and mental pressure on your dispatcher and field teams and improve their productivity.
Moreover, the platform must allow your dispatch team to seamlessly drag and drop the scheduled jobs if there are last-minute changes in the plan so that they don’t have to cancel the previously scheduled job and create a new one with new details.
A powerful optimization engine
If a platform does not optimize your queries when your end goal is to optimize the business process, what is the use of that service? Each business operates under a restrictive environment where the business’s activities are restricted by internal and external factors such as fuel cost, total drive hours, the health of your crew and equipment, and rules and regulations, etc.
Even a typical day at a small business may have hundreds of deliveries and tasks which require extensive route planning under given constraints. Therefore, the platform you opt for must have the capability to quickly and efficiently run thousands of simulations without overloading the system and giving you an optimal solution within given parameters. Moreover, the system must be able to quickly respond to the sudden change in the scheduling to respond to unforeseen circumstances effectively.
No customer is left in the dark.
The robust scheduling and dispatching system must not leave any customer in the dark about the progress of their jobs. The platform must allow two-way communication between the dispatcher, customers, and the crew and allow real-time tracking service so that your customer does not have to constantly check in about the latest progress on a particular task. Moreover, the system must allow your dispatchers to send automated text messages about the progress, change in the estimation, and schedule.
Up to date Map
Route Planning heavily depends on the map for optimization purposes. If a company uses a potentially outdated map, then even optimizing the routes would be of no use. Therefore, the map must have the updated information about the different routes, real-time congestion data, alternative routes, divergences, and even rush hours as well so that the results obtained from optimization are applicable in reality.
If you are a moving, installation, cleaning, or event management company, I would suggest you look at Arrivy’s scheduling, dispatch, and route planning services. The company has a platform that can handle large volumes of tasks, have a very user-friendly interface for the crew and dispatchers, and provide two-way communication through job journals.
