Short answer: Fleet Review is a vRouted tool that takes next week's recurring deliveries and plans them in full once for every fleet you want to try. That could be four vans instead of five, an earlier start, a mix of early and late shifts, or a sixth van for the busy days. It ranks the options by cost against your vans as they are today and names every drop an option would miss, with the reason. When you've picked one, you can apply it to your vans in one step.
The question every small fleet asks
If you run a handful of vans, the biggest decisions aren't about which order to visit customers in. They're about the fleet itself: whether you need the extra van you've been thinking about, whether you could drop one now a big customer has gone, whether a 05:00 start would get the early windows done, whether two vans on a late shift would cover the afternoon drops better than everyone starting at 07:00.
Most owners answer these by trying it. You hire a van for a month, move a driver's start time and see how the week goes. That works, but it's slow, it costs money while you find out, and one odd week can make a good change look bad or a bad one look good.
What Fleet Review does
You list the options you want to compare. Each option is a number of vans and the shifts they run, for example "4 × 05:00-15:00" or "3 × 06:00-16:00 plus 2 × 10:00-20:00". If you'd rather not type them out, give it a list of fleet sizes, start times and shift lengths and it adds every combination. A single review can compare up to 40 options of up to 20 vans each.
Fleet Review then plans next week's recurring deliveries for each option exactly as vRouted would plan them for real: drops split across vans by capacity, each round sequenced against delivery windows, drop times and drivers' shifts, and drive times from real roads. Your current vans are always included as "Today", so every option is compared with what you run now rather than with a guess.
Reading the results
Options that make every drop come first, cheapest first. The cheapest option that makes every drop is marked Best. For each option you see:
- Drops made, and every drop it misses, named with the reason - for example "wants 15:00-17:00; no van can get there then"
- Van-days and driver hours across the week
- The week's cost, using the rates you've set in Settings, with anything dearer than today shown in red
How costs are counted
Costs come from your own rates under Settings -> Units & Costs, plus each van's cost per distance. A van used on a day pays its driver for the whole shift, because that's how most small fleets actually pay. That means a longer shift has to earn its keep, and an option that sends out a fifth van for three drops shows up as the expensive choice it is. If you haven't set any rates, Fleet Review tells you, so you don't mistake a comparison with no costs in it for a real one.
Applying an option
When an option looks right, Apply these vans shows exactly what will change before you commit: which vans keep their shift, which move to a new one, which new vans are added (copying an existing van's depot and settings) and which are paused. Paused vans aren't deleted, so you can bring them back. Plans you've already made don't change; the next ones you make use the new setup.
When to run one
A review is worth running whenever the shape of your work changes:
- Before buying, leasing or hiring another van
- When you win or lose a big customer, or a run of new ones
- Ahead of a seasonal peak or a quiet spell
- When drivers are regularly in overtime, or regularly back by lunchtime
- When customers ask for earlier or later delivery windows
What you need first
Fleet Review plans your recurring deliveries for next week, so they need to be set up under Multi-Day Planning -> Recurring Deliveries, and at least one van needs a depot. The page shows what it will plan before you start - the deliveries, your vans today and your cost rates - with links to change any of them. A review is usually ready within 25 minutes, and you can leave the page: we'll email you when it's ready. Fleet Review is included on the Pro plan, and you can run up to three reviews a day.
Where it fits
Day-to-day planning answers "what's the best way to run tomorrow with the vans I have?" Fleet Review answers the question behind it: "are these the right vans?" If you're weighing up a change to your fleet, see the features page or start a 14-day trial from the pricing page. For the day-to-day side, see how to calculate cost per drop and driver scheduling and shift planning.
About the author
Founder of Anteam, the East Midlands industrial AI company behind vRouted. She led development of Anteam's ant-colony-inspired route-matching platform, backed by the Department for Transport, Innovate UK and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
Planning multi-drop rounds for a UK fleet? Read the guide to route planning software for multi-drop distributors.
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