When planning your journeys, you will come across some obscure locations (most likely in rural areas or new housing builds) and it’s important that any transport routing software includes a manual override of any address suggested.
This enables the transport manager or operator to pinpoint the exact location of a pickup, bus stop, or drop-off point or nail down exactly a remote location on a map. Without getting exact locations your mileage estimates are thrown off. With Road XS, no matter what location you’re trying to find we’ll get you there.
Using this type of software ensure ensures your transport costs and planning time are greatly reduced. Scheduling software ensures that you are working from efficient routes with real-time arrival time updates and delivery windows. This is why transport planners and route planning software solutions such as Road XS are becoming ever more popular within the public sector.
How Does Transport Routing Software Work?
Believe it or not, transport routing software is more complicated than you might think. On the face of it, you pick someone up and drop them off. But the passenger also needs a driver allocated to them and if you’re running a delivery or demand responsive transport service a vehicle too.
Once you know the key points of the journey you can then enter multiple pickups and drop-offs accordingly. But then you also must factor in vehicle loading totals as the journey happens along with any passenger or delivery loading times too.
Within Road XS, we’ve made sure this all happens at the click of a button to ensure your transport operation is running at maximum efficiency as well as removing manual work.
Road XS automatically works out the optimal route based on all the variables provided from the data so that you don’t have to.
We do this by using a mapping engine and our built-in algorithms to instantly calculate all outcomes of the potential options and then present you with the most useful one to deliver your immediate journey needs. This provides an accurate time of arrival as well as optimised delivery routes too.
Once the route has been established, we then bring together the full picture of what is also happening around this journey to see if the vehicles and driver options can be optimised further once we have considered the availability of each.
Our What3Words integration enables you to really zone in on exactly where you are looking to take someone, providing incredible accuracy. This is especially useful when visiting large hospitals with multiple entrances meaning that you don’t send your drivers off to the wrong location despite being on the right site.
No longer do you need to spend hours strategic planning when you have transport software as sophisticated as Road XS at your disposal.
What Are the Benefits of Transport Routing Software?
Without transport routing software you would need to manually calculate all route variables which is not only time-consuming but also inaccurate because eventually, your services will grow so much, you’ll be out of your depth in working out all the trips required.
Here are just a few of the benefits:
- Automated route calculations and vehicle routes: Instead of manually calculating your routes by hand using Google Maps and ‘guestimating’, everything gets automatically optimised for you. Watch your transport services come to life.
- Estimated mileage and costs: All estimated mileage and time deliveries are shown without needing to lift a finger. This reduces stress and provides a 360 view of your transport operations.
- Smaller carbon footprint and reduced fuel costs: By optimising your routes, you are helping save the planet as well as reducing your operating costs by saving fuel. If you are operating from a demand-responsive model, then all the routes are optimised to meet your key variables.
- Greater use of resources: By optimising your delivery fleet, vehicles and drivers, you are spreading the load across your organisation and avoiding unconscious bias towards particular drivers or passengers. Workloads get shared and the load is halved.
- Faster journey creation: When creating your journeys you get to see the route in real time. This means you don’t have to guess what’s ahead, you already know.
- Better team cohesion: By bringing your team together on one platform, you can work closer together even if you work remotely. Your team will have one point of contact to react and respond to whatever is happening on the day.
- A better understanding of service usage: With real-time reporting not only do you save time having to manually generate the reports, but you can actually get immediate feedback on how your transport services are performing. This is a better allocation of resources and also provides increased accuracy.
- Less time planning and more time doing: With advanced route planning software you can get detailed route planning and travel times without the need to look anything up.
- Reduced transportation costs: Not only do you reduce your operating costs but software such as Road XS reduces your labour costs too, as it removes a lot of the additional work you would normally have to do by hand or by spreadsheet.
- Improved customer expectations as well as customer satisfaction: Thanks to real-time tracking and more accurate plans, you can provide accurate routes to your drivers which improves your overall service.
- Real-time visibility of your transport operations: With transport software, you can see your shortest routes, fleet operations, logistics operations customer addresses and more all in one place. This provides a complete view of your entire operation.
- Real-time data reporting: By looking through your data, you can plan for the “What-if” scenarios and improve your daily planning process. This is of great help to all transport service providers and it means you don’t need additional software to operate your day-to-day services. With Road XS for example everything is integrated.
- GPS location tracking with advanced features: Having a mobile app for your driver portal means that you can provide your drivers with a clear view of what journeys they are involved with on any given day. It also means you can see which passengers have been picked up and which deliveries have happened and by what time.
It’s likely you won’t see the benefits of transport routing software until you have tried it.
Why waste time manually guestimating and playing with when software such as Road XS can at a click of a button automate all this for you?
Transport managers’ time can be better spent finding out your passenger needs and personal requirements, entering the journeys into the software and analysing the data to enable you to make informed decisions.
With Road XS, once the route has been entered you can learn key performance indicators to then make better decisions about how to utilise your transport services even better across the area you serve.
