5 top tips for vehicle routing in bad weather

Last week, just two days after the first day of summer, the Met Office issued an Amber warning. The definition of this weather warning is “Be prepared. There is an increased likelihood of bad weather affecting you, which could potentially disrupt your plans and possibly cause travel delays, road and rail closures”. Even in our British climate, the particularly heavy rainfall took many by surprise with flooded roads and train lines causing travel chaos across England. Twitter feeds were awash – if you’ll forgive the pun – with photos of submerged cars, flooded railway stations and commuters valiantly fighting their way into work.

Despite our weather forecasters’ best intentions we are often caught out by unpredictable bad weather events. This can send vehicle routing schedules into complete disarray, leaving transport planners with a backlog of orders and a host of unhappy customers wanting to know when their delivery is going to arrive.

Here are 5 top tips to keep your vehicle routing on track during bad weather:

1. Be prepared. As with any business continuity strategy, you need to have contingency plans at the ready. Take the time to run a number of ‘what if’ scenarios through your routing and scheduling system. For example, try closing high risk roads, modelling depot closures or slowing down your average road speeds to assess the overall impact on resource requirements and delivery times.

2. Make use of the valuable local knowledge that your transport teams have. Together you can identify the well-known trouble spots that arise in the face of adverse weather conditions and agree the best re-routing options. This will give you a “bad weather” set-up and a more accurate ‘Plan B’ for the time when you really need one.

3. Make the most of the link between your route planning and vehicle tracking to ensure delays are dealt with promptly. Integrating your routing and scheduling software with your vehicle tracking system with tools like Paragon Route Execution, allows you to automatically monitor actual vehicle progress against your planned routes in real time.

4. Keep customers informed. In adverse weather conditions, some delay is understandable but it is still better to be able to provide your customers with advance notification, especially if you know that a delivery time will be missed. By comparing your plan against actual in real-time, you can proactively provide updates. Your customer services team can have access to this data via an easy to view web page, or equally you can provide customers with automated SMS or email communication alerts to keep them updated.

5. Keep up to date on the day. Traffic will quickly build up around flooded junctions, or broken down vehicles causing congestion. Keep an eye on how the changing weather conditions are impacting the road networks by checking out problem areas during the day using a tool like Google Maps Traffic.

While it’s hard to ensure that your transport operation carries on regardless during adverse weather conditions, you can use your vehicle routing system to carry out strategic planning in advance and closely monitor the execution of your plan on the day. If you have any questions about using a vehicle routing system to carry out what-if scenarios, or would like to know more about the vehicle tracking systems that Paragon Route Execution integrates with, get in touch to talk to one of our experienced team.