6 Ways to Cut Costs from Your Transport Operation with Aptean Routing & Scheduling
1. Optimising Your Delivery Routes
Reducing miles and fuel consumption
Deciding which route your vehicles should take to the delivery destination is not always as simple as choosing the shortest distance.
Physical height, weight and load-type restrictions, one-way streets, roadworks or congestion caused by local events, can make the shortest distance route impossible.
The impact felt by these factors is then compounded when planning a multi-drop route as extra miles and time incurred affect the arrival times of subsequent deliveries.
Aptean’s advanced route optimisation algorithms, coupled with detailed mapping options, calculate the best route for your vehicles in seconds.
Comparing the distances between each delivery point and your warehouse, the system creates a feasible route sequence that will ensure minimum mileage and fuel consumption.
By optimising the drop sequence and route, Aptean Routing & Scheduling can increase the number of drops per vehicle and reduce the number of trips required to complete the day’s deliveries. This can result in substantial cost savings including fuel consumption, ongoing vehicle maintenance costs and driver wages.
2. Cut your planning time
Explore new transport strategies and improve vehicle utilisation
With so many factors and variables to consider for each delivery, transport planning can be a time-intensive job. But with Aptean Routing & Scheduling, you can cut your planning time from hours to minutes with just a few clicks!
As standard, our implementation specialists configure the software for your business, with vehicle types and sizes, loading times, delivery restrictions, meal breaks, and pre-agreed delivery time windows.
By cutting your planning time to just a few minutes, planners have more time to prepare for seasonal demand fluctuations and investigate alternative transport strategies.
With Aptean you can use your transport team’s expertise and knowledge to improve efficiency further, saving money and miles.
With less time spent planning your routes and schedules, order cut off times can be relaxed, often resulting in more orders being placed and fulfilled each day – decreasing your cost per drop. For many businesses, those extra hours gained equate to better use of vehicle capacity, helping to manage fluctuations in volumes or business growth without the need for additional trucks.
3. Maximise vehicle and fleet utilisation
Improving drops per vehicle and reducing agency vehicle requirements
As your transport operation grows, the opportunity for inefficiency can increase too. Over reliance on hire vehicles to cope with extra demand and under-utilised own-fleet vehicles can often prove costly – but it doesn’t have to be this way.
You can often achieve a higher number of drops per trip by optimising your drop sequence. This, in turn, can determine the number of vehicles you need in your fleet and ensure agency resources are only used where necessary, reducing your cost per drop.
If you have a fleet of mixed vehicle sizes, Aptean Routing & Scheduling can allocate loads based on pre-defined rules specific to your business to help further increase the number of drops per vehicle. To help cut your agency costs further, our software enables you to prioritise allocating work to your own fleet before using expensive agency resources, ensuring your vehicles are not sitting at the depot while you pay for a hire vehicle and driver.
4. Improve planning with real-time data
Comparing planned vs. actual schedules
Ensuring your transport plan is optimised for efficiency is important, but what happens out on the road can have a massive impact on whether you reach your cost savings goals.
Without visibility, opportunities for further cost reduction through improved planning are often missed.
By linking your vehicle tracking systems with Aptean Route Execution Paragon Edition you can review planned vs. actual activity reports. This highlights areas where costs could be cut simply by amending your planning parameters.
For example, if there is excessive slack in the plan you may be able to cut the planned unloading time by 10 minutes which could mean that an extra drop can be added to the trip.
By giving your transport planners visibility of real-world activity they can refine planning parameters for a more realistic and cost-efficient schedule.
