5 Ways to Reduce Mileage with Routing and Scheduling Optimization

With each New Year, comes a time for businesses to reflect on what they did last year and look ahead to what they hope to change in the coming year. Getting a better handle on data or streamlining processes are common goals we hear from transport and logistics industry professionals who need to control operating costs to stay ahead of the competition.

Taking advantage of technology solutions, such as Paragon’s routing and scheduling optimization software, can help you lower fuel usage, improve carbon emissions, better utilize resources, and reduce transportation costs – all resulting in a big impact on your bottom line. Paragon solutions are flexible and scalable; as a result the systems deliver benefits to transportation operations across a wide range of industry sectors and distribution operation types.

We’ve put together a list of 5 ways that using vehicle routing and scheduling optimization solutions can help you reduce mileage, cut transportation costs, and better utilize assets in the coming year.

Five ways to reduce mileage with routing and scheduling optimization solutions:

1. Strategic network design

Look at how you allocate your customers to your Distribution Centers (DCs) to determine the best network of DC locations to satisfy your customer service requirements most cost effectively. Paragon’s Fastnet network modeling tool helps you determine the best network of distribution centers and depots. It utilizes historical order volumes to decide which customers to serve from each DC, recommends how many and which sites should be used, and allocates delivery points to DCs. This improves transportation efficiency, reduces total mileage, and fosters better customer service due to appropriate allocation of customers to each DC.

2. Intelligent route optimization

Optimize your truck routes to cuts costs, optimize vehicle use, streamline operations and help you make the most of every drop of fuel, while cutting carbon emissions. Paragon’s advanced routing and scheduling optimization software provides intelligent route optimization so that companies can reduce their total annual mileage, which in turn cuts fuel usage and carbon emissions. These operations can also typically reduce their truck fleets by up 20% – delivering the same products with fewer trucks. Since a truck typically generates hundreds of tons of carbon dioxide emissions in its lifetime, this also has a direct impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

3. Make your truck route plans as accurate as possible to deliver better results

There is no point creating a transportation plan that does not reflect the real world. Utilizing a vehicle-tracking tool can tell how long it really takes a driver to deliver and/or collect at each customer site. Then you refine planning parameters accordingly. The more accurate your route plans, the more likely you are to achieve more realistic savings.

4. Reduce empty running of trucks

If your drivers could pick up another load on the way back to the depot, then trucks are better utilized. Paragon’s Integrated Fleets option enables vehicles and drivers at multiple sites to be treated as a single integrated transportation resource, so that movements from different depots can be combined into efficient routes that reduce overall empty running. This inter-working of multiple fleets generates route plans with efficient backloads, which increases asset utilization, improves productivity and reduces empty mileage.

5. Flexibility is key

So many variables exist from delivery to delivery, that you need a system that is extremely flexible to consider any situation. Paragon’s software takes into account things like school zones, one-way streets, sporting events, building/bridge height restrictions, driver schedules, lunch hours, hours of service restrictions, loading times, vehicle capacities, and much, much more. By offering the flexibility to incorporate an unlimited amount of variables, Paragon’s routing and scheduling optimization solutions create the most optimal routes that lower fuel usage and reduce mileage.

Paragon can even help you design efficient compact territories with even workloads for distribution operations within different regions or where drivers work in specific zones. Paragon’s Territory Optimizer uses true road-based journey calculations, taking into account highways and rivers, for example, to accurately calculate transportation workloads and the compactness of each territory. The result is a territory that is geographically compact to reduce overall mileage, travel time, and transportation costs.