6 Ways Businesses Benefit from Route Planning Software

Route Planning Business Benefits

Does your business involve field sales, deliveries, logistics, or a supply chain? Then route planning is critical to your success. The more efficient your routes are, the faster your employees get where they need to go. That means less time driving and more time working.

To maximize their results, many businesses are turning to route planning software that uses GPS technology. These tools automate the process and make it easy to identify the best route.

Are you thinking about implementing this technology in your business? Here are five route planning software benefits to consider.

1. Faster Route Planning

Routing software for businesses doesn’t just save you time while your employees are on the road. It also speeds up the process of actually planning your routes. In fact, it’s been shown that software can reduce your route planning time by up to 20%.

How much time do you spend on route planning for your employees? Depending on your business, this process alone can take an hour or more. Imagine how much time could be saved if you had software that instantly calculated the quickest route between two or more locations.

And it’s not just the initial planning that you need to consider. What if one of your employees runs into traffic or construction and needs to re-route? They could spend valuable time in the field finding another route, or they might choose an inefficient route that delays them further.

With routing optimization software, enter your starting destination and your stops to find the best route in seconds. If you’re using cloud-based software, like Maptive, your team can take their route planner with them and recalculate their route with ease. 

2. Reduced Operating Costs

One of the best ways to increase your profits is to lower your costs. Luckily, route planning software gives you the chance to reduce your expenses in a few different ways:

  • Less Wear and Tear on Your Vehicles: Shorter routes mean fewer miles on your vehicles. Not only does this lead to a reduced maintenance schedule, but it also extends the life of your vehicles.
  • Fewer Vehicles on the Road: You might find that as your routes become more efficient, you’re able to achieve the same amount of work with fewer vehicles. This again reduces maintenance costs and might even allow you to sell vehicles that are no longer needed.
  • Lower Fuel Costs: Less driving time and fewer vehicles being used translate to lower fuel consumption.
  • Less Labor: With fewer vehicles on the road, it also means you’ll need fewer drivers. You may also find that your employees complete all their stops quicker, which further reduces your labor costs.

Overall, studies show that route planning software helps you lower your expenses by 10% – 30%, which has a major impact on your bottom line.

3. Increased Scalability

Every business owner dreams of scaling their business and taking it to the next level. But that’s difficult to do when too many manual tasks bog you down. High expenses also limit your ability to scale.

Route planning software automates a lot of your processes around outbound sales and deliveries. This frees you up to focus on other areas of your business, like developing sales strategies, hiring team members, and identifying new customers.

As we discussed, route optimization tools also reduce your costs. Money saved can be invested back into the business, giving you access to new tools and resources that you previously couldn’t afford.

Becoming more efficient and developing better processes is critical to scaling your business. And this starts with investing in the right route optimization solution.

4. Continuous Optimization

In business, things rarely go as planned. Sales calls get canceled, additional deliveries come in, or new opportunities present themselves right at the end of the day. These sorts of things happen all the time, and you need to be prepared.

If you’re planning routes manually, cancellations and new stops can throw your entire day off. You or your staff have to stop what you’re doing to develop a plan. And if you’re not quick enough, you may lose valuable opportunities for your business.

But this is never an issue with sales routing software. Add and remove stops on the fly and recalculate your routes with ease. That way, your business continually optimizes itself, even as situations evolve and change.

5. Business Intelligence

Good route planning software doesn’t just plan routes. It also has other capabilities, like tracking sales, visualizing data, and territory management.

For example, in addition to route planning, Maptive offers a variety of services that improve your business intelligence:

  • Upload customer locations and automatically plot them on a map.
  • Display a wide variety of data for every customer, including sales rep, total revenue, average sales value, and more.
  • Filter data in and out of your map depending on what you’re working on.
  • Use drivetime polygons to find customers within driving distance
  • Measure customer and sales trends with heat maps.
  • Create territories based on zip codes, counties, and states, or draw your own custom territories.

According to a report by Bain & Company, this type of data visualization offers an average ROI of $13.01 back on every dollar spent. In addition, with these tools, you’ll uncover new insights that better inform your decision-making.

6. Better Customer Service

One of the biggest benefits of route planning software is how it allows you to increase customer satisfaction. Saving time and money, improving your processes, and scaling your business is great. But in the end, your success as a business will come down to your ability to meet customer expectations.

Better routes mean you’re able to reach your customers faster. It also ensures you’re not late for appointments or deliveries. Plus, as customer demand for your service rises, you’ll need to adapt. Having a strong route-planning solution allows you to maximize the number of stops you can make in a day, letting you service customers now instead of making them wait.

Start Planning Your Routes Today

Are you ready to optimize routes quickly and easily? Then, sign up for your free trial of Maptive and start route planning today.

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