Unlock More Power in OptimoRoute by Customizing Your Vehicles and Drivers

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If your business is like many others that we work with, you may employ drivers and technicians with a diverse range of skill sets, and you likely use a variety of vehicle types to service your customers’ needs. 

Whether you’re running a delivery business or working in field service, quite often you will need the right person combined with the right type of truck, van, or service vehicle feature to get the job done right. 

OptimoRoute is easily configurable to adapt to any unique circumstances that you and your customers may need to consider. Let’s start by showing you how to customize your vehicle fleet. 

Why should you add your vehicle details into OptimoRoute?

By creating your vehicle, adding the vehicle details, and associating the vehicle with your orders, OptimoRoute will know that orders requiring these features will be assigned only to the vehicles that have this feature. 

For example, one of your deliveries may require a refrigerated truck. We commonly see this in the grocery, beverage, and even pharmaceutical industries. Or, perhaps your business serves customers onsite in the field, like a carpet cleaning service that uses a truck-mounted water tank. 

No matter your business type and size, OptimoRoute can take all of your vehicle needs into account during your planning and optimizing process. 

Pro-Tip: Unlock even more power in OptimoRoute with Capacities

Wouldn’t it be great if our delivery vehicles had an unlimited amount of space? Unfortunately, our fleets are, of course, bound by the laws of nature. This means that for delivery businesses in particular, there’s only a certain amount of orders that will fit into a given vehicle.  

Commonly, vehicle capacities can have the following constraints:

• Number of boxes that can fit into the vehicle
• Weight of orders that can be loaded on the vehicle
• Volume of orders that can fit into the vehicle
• Number of pallets that can be loaded onto the vehicle

The good news is that OptimoRoute can account for your vehicle capacity during planning. Under Settings in the Administration menu, you’ll find a Capacities option on the left side menu. Simply select the options that you want to apply to your orders. 

We also have an option of returning to the depot, where the driver can load up the vehicle again and be back on the road. This is helpful to businesses that have only small vehicles in their fleet, but many orders. 

Most often, we find that the capacities/loads features work best for the delivery business that we support. If you are performing field service instead of deliveries, vehicle capacity is typically not a limiting factor, so you’re welcome to bypass this option. 

What about my drivers and technicians? How can OptimoRoute help me account for their skill sets and costs?

With OptimoRoute, you can explicitly optimize for hourly costs, overtime costs, fixed costs, and so on. Creating drivers, modifying drivers, and adding their details is easy. When defining driver details, you can also assign driver skills to differentiate some drivers from others.

For example, if all drivers/technicians make installations but only certain ones can do maintenance and repairs, you can create these two skills in the system. Assign the skills to drivers in driver administration and specify the required skills when you create the orders.

This way, OptimoRoute will know that orders requiring these skills will be assigned only to the drivers with those skills.

We’d highly recommend you add in your driver skills and costs as this can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Upon creation, every driver is given equal value, so accurate driver expense information here is crucial. OptimoRoute will automatically prioritize your least expensive drivers when it plans your day. That includes employees as well as contractors, who tend to be more expensive. Our product experts can help you set up your driver costs in the best way possible during your trial. 

How else can I customize my driver settings?

Start and End Locations allow you to create a starting and/or ending point for this driver that is not the depot. Whether you have different depots, or workers can begin or end their day at home, activating this feature allows you more flexibility. 

Service Areas is another helpful feature that allows you to create a specific area to be serviced by a specific worker. When a driver is given an area, they will automatically be assigned to any order that is located within their area. If two drivers have overlapping service areas, then the orders will be shared between the two. Orders outside of these service areas will still be shared among all drivers. 

OptimoRoute can also take into account your driver’s daily break. When a break is taken arbitrarily, it can disrupt the remaining scheduled orders. This can be especially problematic when you have a specific time window available for certain deliveries, services, or appointments.

Taking into consideration that many countries legally require employees to take a break during the work day, we have incorporated a simple way to guarantee a break period in a way that minimizes the impact on the daily schedule.

Check out the work break requirements for a few different regions below:

• US regulations: https://www.dol.gov/whd/state/rest.htm (varies between states)
• EU/European regulations: https://www.gov.uk/drivers-hours/eu-rules
• Canadian regulations: http://www.servicecanada.gc.ca/eng/about/publication/workers_rights.shtml

Will adding in my driver and vehicle features slow down my planning process?

What separates OptimoRoute from other route planners out in the market is the speed of the software and the power of our algorithm. 

Even when you add in your customizations, you’ll see that the best routes for your day are still planned in a matter of seconds. OptimoRoute does all of the hard work for you by taking into account any dependencies for your orders as you plan them. 

If you’re interested in learning more about our features, one of our product experts would be happy to discuss your use case and show you how OptimoRoute can solve the challenges you face. To get started, click on the free trial button below, or reach out to our team at sales@optimoroute.com anytime.