Sabina Martin had heard from drivers working for a fleet operating in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that they would pass their buddies that work for the same company along their routes.
“There are a lot of overlaps in terms of their origin and destination … Surely that doesn't seem efficient,” Martin, vice president of product management for Geotab, said during a keynote at the Geotab Connect 2024 conference held in Las Vegas last week.
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The tech provider introduced its new routing and optimization solution during the conference – a solution that has helped the fleet reduce total hours by 32 and reduce the number of overlapping territories from 21 to one.
“With this solution, you can create and optimize your route plans; you can minimize driving time or minutes late time, or you can decide to pick a balance of both; you can even input success factors or constraints like if there are times that customers don't want you to arrive or if you want to allow drivers to work overtime,” Martin said. “You can invest this time and money (savings) into additional drivers or other things for your feet and business.”
For a driver who has 10 stops to complete in one day, there could be upward of three million routes to choose from. The solution allows fleet managers to isolate the most efficient route based on data insights, including customer needs like requested arrival windows, traffic data and available fleet resources, helping businesses control costs, increase productivity and uptime and improve customer service.
The optimized routing increases on-time arrivals up to 98% and reduces mileage by approximately 15% to 30%, allowing for fuel savings or range preservation in electric fleets.
