Route Optimization
Route optimization means planning the most efficient and cost-effective route between two or more destinations. It's more than just finding the quickest route from A to B. It’s about maximizing your use of time and resources.
Get optimal routes for vehicles, agents, and workers with the Route Planner API. Contact us for a consultation, and our experts will help you find the best solution for your business case.
Any business whose employees need to travel regularly can benefit from route optimization:
- Delivery and logistics companies
- Food delivery businesses
- Service providers such as garden maintenance or building repairs
- Trainers that deliver in-person workshops
- Home care providers
- Waste collection services
- Transit service providers
And many more. Sales teams can use a Route Optimization to make sure they're covering their territory most efficiently. Ride-sharing services can use it to plan their pickup and dropoff routes, and managers who need to travel to multiple offices can plan the best way.
Why Is Route Optimization Important?
Travel costs are a heavy burden on any business. Fuel costs represent as much as 24% of overall costs for motor carriers. Route optimization means you get the best mileage for your money, keeping fuel costs as low as practically possible. Route optimization also helps businesses make the best of their most valuable asset: Their people. With route optimization, you can make the best use of your employees’ time.
Take The Guesswork Out Of Route Planning
Our Route Optimization API takes the guesswork out of route planning for yourself, management, or your team. Geoapify gives you real-time information about different routes, and you can put in restrictions to make sure the route is fit for use.
For example, you can remove toll roads, or avoid bridges below a certain height that aren't suitable for your fleet. Figuring out routes manually takes a lot of time and effort, which prevents you from carrying out other tasks. Not to mention the risk of human error leads to frustration, wasted time, and more money paid on fuel. Using Geoapify saves you all that time and effort, and delivers routes that are up-to-date and accurate.
Route Planning Helps Boost Employee Morale
As well as saving time and money, optimizing routes helps boost employee satisfaction. With employee turnover costing businesses in the US alone a staggering $1 trillion yearly, employee satisfaction is important to your bottom line.
Workload is a leading cause of employee stress, which is a key reason employees leave their jobs. Creating optimal routes reduces stress by making sure employees arrive at the right place, at the right time, equipped with the right equipment.
Use cases and Solutions
Let's have a look at some different use cases.
1. Plan the most effective vehicle route
Let's talk for a moment about the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and why it matters to your business. The traveling salesman problem asks the question, “what is the shortest route a salesman could take between a number of cities that must be visited, before returning to their point of origin?”
This problem doesn't only apply to salesmen, but to any situation where a vehicle needs to make multiple stops and then return to home base or another location. Consultants who need to visit several businesses in a day need to solve this problem. Holiday makers need to solve it so they can plan the best itinerary.
Anyone who needs to hit a certain number of stops, needs to do so in the most efficient way. Efficient might mean the shortest length, the shortest time, or a combination. Geoapify can help you with both.
Geoapify goes beyond just distance or time, and lets you take into account important factors such as rest stops, food breaks, or overnight stays. Our Route Planner API calculates optimal routes, and can also rearrange waypoints to find the best route.
2. Create efficient delivery routes
When you have a fleet of vehicles that needs to reach multiple locations, it's important to build the most efficient route for them. This is known as the Vehicle Routing Problem, which asks the question “what is the optimal set of routes for several vehicles to take in order to reach a given set of customers?”
When you're dealing with several vehicles traveling to different locations, you want to find both the optimal distribution of tasks among the drivers, and the best route for each individual vehicle.
Any business that manages a fleet of vehicles can benefit from vehicle route optimization, including postal services, food delivery, repair services, waste collection and public transit. Calculating the most efficient route helps businesses like yours reduce travel costs for your fleet, and maximize delivery drivers' time.
Geoapify lets you factor in parameters such as employee working hours, vehicle capacity restrictions, and vehicle height and weight. You can also take into account required skills for employees to go to specific locations, for example repair teams that need more experienced repair people to take on certain jobs.
With our product you can construct routes for driving, trucking, walking, or cycling.
3. Build schedules that work for your business
If your business has multiple workers visiting multiple customers, it's important to plan the best order to visit those customers for maximum use of time and resources. More efficient schedules mean happier customers. With nearly half of customers saying they're unlikely to order again from a business that delivered their package late, arriving on time matters.
Schedule optimization is vital for repair and maintenance teams, social help workers, sales teams, and any other team where multiple employees are visiting multiple customers.
Businesses often need to take into account a range of factors when using an API for delivery route optimization, including employee working hours, opening hours, which customers take priority, and whether each stopping point requires the worker to have specific skills or tools.
Geoapify solves the problem of building the most efficient schedule for your team. You can use it to define order of priority, and allow for desired hours, working hours and breaks, worker capacities, and task requirements. Geoapify lets you build highly customized schedules that work for your business. Try schedule optimization for free right now on the Geoapify API Playground.
Conclusion
Geoapify offers scalable and flexible Route Optimization Solutions that take into account your business' needs. We also offer a Matrix API if you would like to implement and use your own optimization solutions. We offer affordable pricing for businesses of every size. Our team can help you find the solution you need. Get in touch with us today.