Fuel is one of the biggest expenses for any distribution company. And in most cases, a significant portion of that expense can be avoided through better route planning.
We’re not talking about magic or expensive technology. We’re talking about stopping your delivery person from crossing the city twice when they could have made all the deliveries in the same area in a single trip.
The True Cost of Poorly Organized Routes
Imagine that your delivery driver makes 20 deliveries a day in a medium-sized city. If the routes aren’t optimized, he or she will likely travel between 80 and 120 kilometers a day. With a well-planned route, that same delivery driver can make the same 20 deliveries while traveling only 55 to 70 kilometers.
The difference—between 30 and 50 fewer kilometers per day—directly translates into fuel savings. At an average operating cost of $0.80 per kilometer, that amounts to $24 to $40 per day. Over a month of operation: between $480 and $800 in savings per vehicle.
If you have 3 vehicles, the potential savings exceed $2,000 per month.
The 4 Most Common Mistakes in Delivery Routes
1. Planning the route on the spot, without prior preparation The delivery person sets out with a list of orders and decides on the fly where to go first. Without a logical order, they end up zigzagging through the city as calls come in or as they remember the addresses.
2. Do not group orders by geographic area. Orders are assigned to a delivery person without considering whether they are close to one another. As a result, on a single route, the delivery person visits the north, then the south, and then returns to the north.
3. Not taking traffic patterns into account Sending delivery drivers to high-traffic areas during rush hour doubles delivery times and fuel consumption. A well-organized route takes into account which areas to visit at what times.
4. Not measuring productivity by route. Without data on how many kilometers each delivery person travels, how many deliveries they make, and how long it takes them, it’s impossible to know whether the routes are efficient or not. What isn’t measured can’t be improved.
How to Optimize Routes Manually Without Software
If you aren’t using a management system yet, you can improve your routes by following these basic steps:
First, group all of the day’s orders by geographic area before assigning them. Use a map—Google Maps works well—to identify which orders are close to each other.
Second, assign each delivery person a specific area of the city, rather than scattered orders. A delivery person who knows their area well delivers faster and uses less fuel.
Third, it determines the order of deliveries from farthest to closest to the warehouse. The delivery person heads to the farthest location first and returns, making deliveries along the way.
Fourth, avoid areas with heavy traffic between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. and between 12 p.m. and 2 p.m. Schedule your visits to those areas for mid-morning or mid-afternoon.
With these basic adjustments, you can reduce your daily mileage by 15% to 20% without any software.
How to Do It with Route Optimization Software
Specialized software does in seconds what would take half an hour to plan manually—and it does it better.
The system collects all the day’s orders, reads the GPS coordinates for each delivery address, and automatically calculates the optimal order of stops to minimize the total distance traveled.
In addition, with real-time GPS, you can see where each delivery driver is at all times, detect detours, reallocate orders if unexpected issues arise, and keep a record of actual routes versus planned routes.
Yaku has a route optimization module that groups orders by GPS location and automatically generates the most efficient delivery sequence. The delivery driver simply follows the route on their mobile app—no phone calls, no confusion, no on-the-fly decisions.
In addition, Yaku records each stop with exact coordinates, displays each driver’s route history, and generates productivity reports by route and by delivery person.
The expected result in terms of time and fuel
Distributors that implement route optimization report consistent results within the first 30 days:
- A reduction of between 20% and 35% in kilometers traveled per day
- Monthly fuel savings of between 15% and 30%
- An increase of between 10% and 20% in the number of deliveries per delivery person per day
- A reduction of between 30% and 50% in the time spent planning routes each morning
The time you used to spend coordinating via WhatsApp to figure out who’s going where, you can now use to grow your business.
Conclusion
Inefficient routes are literally money down the drain. And the problem isn’t a lack of willingness on the part of your delivery drivers—it’s the lack of a system that organizes the information and calculates the most efficient route.
With basic adjustments, you can improve efficiency by 15% to 20%. With route optimization software like Yaku, you can achieve 30% or more.
Sign up and try Yaku for free for 7 days at yaku.app, and activate route optimization from day one. No credit card required, no strings attached.
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