How Route Optimisation Software Improves Fleet Efficiency

What actually happens when a round gets optimised

A route optimiser takes a depot, the day's drops and a set of constraints. It then searches for the assignment of drops to vans, and the order of drops on each van, that minimises total distance or time while meeting every constraint. The constraints are where the real complexity lives:

• Vehicle capacity: a van can't carry more cages, trays, pallets or kilograms than it holds
• Delivery windows: a pub that only takes deliveries before 11am can't be visited at noon
• Driver hours: shifts have legal and practical limits
• Time at each drop: a cellar drop takes longer than a back-door drop
• Priority: some drops can't be missed, even when the day is over-full

Why small fleets can use it now

Three things have made this practical for a 5-van distributor rather than only for national carriers. First, open-source solvers such as Google's OR-Tools, which vRouted uses, handle capacity and time-window problems of this size in seconds on ordinary cloud servers. Second, geocoding and mapping services have become cheap enough that turning a spreadsheet of addresses into coordinates isn't a project any more. Third, the cost of a wasted mile has not gone down. Fuel, driver time and van wear all mean that even a modest cut in daily miles is a meaningful line on the P&L.

For small UK distributors, the gap is usually the method rather than the technology. Rounds are still built on a whiteboard or a spreadsheet because that's how they've always been built. We cover that workflow, and where it breaks, in how to plan delivery rounds in Excel.

What a realistic efficiency gain looks like

Be sceptical of any vendor, including us, that quotes a precise saving before seeing your rounds. The real gain depends almost entirely on how much slack is in your current plan. A fleet that already plans carefully by hand might see a small improvement. A fleet whose rounds are fixed by habit, while the orders change every day, usually has much more to gain. That's because the rounds were built for last year's customers, not today's.

Most of the saving comes from removing two kinds of waste. The first is backtracking: visiting drops in an order that crosses your own path. The second is poor balance across vans: one van doing 90 miles while another does 30, or a van sent out half full while another can't fit its last drop. Both are easy to miss at ten drops and very hard to catch by eye at fifty.

The honest way to find out is to take one real day's orders, plan them both ways, and compare. That's what our homepage shows: one real day from a UK haulier, comparing the routes actually driven with vRouted's plan for the same jobs. It's evidence of what's possible, not a promise for your fleet.

What to check before trusting a tool's numbers

Not all "optimised" rounds are equal. When evaluating a route planning tool, check three things before the marketing copy:

• How distances are estimated. Some tools plan on full road routing, others on straight-line distance with a road factor. vRouted plans on the road-factor estimate, then measures the finished rounds with Google driving distances where available. Neither approach gives satnav arrival times, so ask which you're getting
• Whether it models the constraints you actually have, such as capacity in your unit, hard delivery windows and shift length, rather than just minimising distance
• Whether you can see the sequence, times and anything it couldn't fit, so a planner can sanity-check the output before it reaches a driver

Getting started

You don't need to overhaul the whole operation to see whether route optimisation is worth it. Take your busiest day, run it through an optimiser alongside your current plan, and compare total miles and hours. If you run foodservice or drinks rounds, our foodservice wholesale and drinks distribution guides walk through what that comparison looks like for those rounds.