Why Your Business Needs Route Optimization Solutions with Field Tracking Software?
Are you seeking to make your delivery or sales procedures error-free? Well, if you continue to plan the sales routes manually and manage swift deliveries, customer satisfaction will still be a challenge even after implementing robust strategies. That’s where effective field tracking software steps in! It aids businesses in leveraging insight data in real-time, identifying reasoning for inaccuracies, tracking drivers' performance, fuel usage, distance traveled, and more.
Without optimizing routes, managers and field employees may find it challenging to respond to emergencies or streamline daily deliveries. Without streamlined route planning and resource allocation, managing orders from varied locations across a vast city can put managers in challenging situations. To address these concerns, a centralized field employee GPS tracking software aids in organizing, tracking movements, and taking the right actions instantly.
Additionally, route planning serves as a backbone of fleet management as it assists businesses in managing operational costs, streamlining sales reps, and ensuring driver efficiency levels. Timely deliveries and swift responses to emergencies enhance customer satisfaction and simplify the workflow with automated route details for field employees through staff location tracking software.
Sounds too good to be true, isn't it? In this blog, we will explore the challenges of field sales reps and how field employees live tracking solutions can address them by highlighting a few impactful strategies to implement effortlessly.
What is Route Planning?
Route planning refers to visually tracking specific routes through a map, which includes landmarks and other geographical data to track employees’ movements on the field in real-time. Implementing field employee GPS tracking software aims to offer managers a clear, interactive, and accurate representation of the field route’s activities.
In addition, route planning or optimization through field tracking software helps solve issues in varied aspects through seamless navigation, simplified route planning for field sales employees, visualization for logistics, and identification of inaccuracies on the field without constantly following up.
Lastly, TrackOlap’s staff location tracking software focuses on streamlining efficiency for field activities, simplifying logistics management, and offering managers a visual map view to track activities and get notifications on specific parameters to manage field operations remotely hassle-free.
Why Do We Need Field Tracking Software for Optimizing Routes?
Route planning helps managers track employees' movements, but its importance goes beyond continuous monitoring. Let us explore a few factors highlighting important route optimization through field employee live tracking tools.
Seamless Navigation on a Daily Basis: Route optimizations help find short and quick routes between Point 1 and Point 2, saving employees time and fuel.
Route Mapping for Effective Delivery: Route planning simplifies tracking employees' movements through GPS, which aids in responding to customers with estimated delivery times, guiding employees to take quick routes and more.
Quick Decision Making with Emergencies: In emergency situations, route mapping simplifies addressing issues by automating route selection and navigating employees in real-time. Additionally, it ensures that employees meet compliance standards and avoids the chances of natural disasters or medical emergencies with field employees.
Common Challenges with Route Planning for Field Operations
As we mentioned above, without visibility into employees' movements on the field, managing emergencies, responding to customer queries, and ensuring employees' safety becomes tedious for managers. However, when you incorporate field employee GPS tracking software with a route planning strategy, all these aspects can be easily managed.
Let us explore a few challenges faced by companies to manage field operations:
1. Ineffective Manual Route Planning
If you are a small business containing few riders and orders, scheduling delivery stops and planning routes manually can be possible. This method can be time-consuming and prone to repetitive errors and inefficiency with huge delivery requirements and a range of delivery stops. In addition, manual route planning can cause a few factors like:
Inefficient Field Operations: When you plan routes manually, you are bound to experience inefficiency in the workflow, causing mislocation of your resources and drastically affecting operational efficiency. This means businesses can end up wasting delivery trucks, utilizing resources ineffectively, and having loopholes in logistics management. When you have varied routes to manage deliveries, you may experience repetitive eros, miscommunications, and delayed deliveries.
Damaging Vehicles: When routes are planned manually, employees often tend to take longer traveling time due to inadequate information. Due to inefficiency in resource accessibility, employees may end up using more fuel, damaging vehicles due to additional usage, and companies may need more budget to repair and maintain these vehicles regularly.
2. Only Focusing on Speed
If you prioritize only on-time delivery or increasing vehicle speed, you may face other consequences that lead to major losses to the company. For example, if you do not consider the factors listed below while planning the delivery process, you may find it difficult to foster efficiency and profitability.
Seamless load balance
Duration of delivery stops
Traffic conditions
Necessary breaks
Vehicle limitation aspects
Driver’s skills
Avoiding these factors can cause inefficiency in your delivery procedure, like unexpected delays, missing deadlines, and increased operational costs. In addition, limiting your focus to only high speed to deliver orders on time can lead to further consequences such as:
Enhanced Fuel Cost: When routes are planned thoroughly, drivers may take inefficient routes, which means more fuel is consumed than is required for overall traveling trips. This often affects the operational budget and needs to align with the company's sustainable objectives.
Minimized Profitability: Due to increased fuel prices, frequent vehicle damages, and delayed deliveries, inefficiency in sales operations reduces business profitability. Inefficiency in sales operations tends to minimize the business's potential growth over time.
3. Avoiding to Monitor Driver’s Movements
Avoiding monitoring driver movements and route selection can lead to repetitive sales operational issues, increased operational costs, and missed opportunities. Monitoring employee idle time, time consumed to complete per delivery, fuel usage, and daily distance traveled is essential for organizations to manage daily operations, and the field employee live tracking system takes care of this quickly.
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However, failing to tracking route’s activities can cause a few challenges such as:
Missing Competitive Opportunities: Organizations that fail to optimize route planning risk losing their competitive edge in the market. Monitoring employee movements aids in identifying loopholes, probable opportunities, and route conditions and optimizing delivery procedures to attain customer satisfaction.
Top Ways to Simplify Route Planning with Staff Location Tracking Software
Optimizing routes through field tracking software offers organizations a range of perks, such as reducing fuel costs, streamlining delivery procedures, managing emergencies, promptly responding to customers based on driver activities, and continuously monitoring employee movements in real-time. Let us explore a few strategies that can help streamline field workflows and foster efficiency with ideal route selection in advance.
1. Drive Efficiency & Save Operational Time
Optimizing route planning through field employee GPS tracking software aids in accessing data in real-time to identify ideal routes for employees, ensure their safety, and improve the delivery process. In addition, this software helps managers manage a few aspects listed below with data-driven reports.
Delivery time insights
Capacity of overall vehicles
Employee’s availability
Traffic conditions
By evaluating routes in advance through the insights, organizations can save their employees' travel time and minimize fuel usage, which ultimately helps save operational costs. In addition, managers can automate sharing details of the routes while allocating tasks to employees to save time from unnecessary confusion and back-and-forth confirmation calls.
2. Optimize Field Strategies Through Reliable Data
When you opt for manual route planning, misjudgment of delivery distance, requirements, lack of ability to select the suitable routes or estimated delivery time is bound to happen due to unaligned workflow and lack of visibility. That’s when a field tracking software comes into action!
It aids in evaluating varied aspects influencing route planning. Through continuous tracking and appealing map view, managers can consider assigning tasks through the map view feature, and via the geofence feature, businesses can easily track movements in real-time, identify inaccuracies, or notify employees when there is a change in their schedule for emergency deliveries. This tool notifies managers of a few parameters:
Vehicle speed limit
Distance traveled per day
Idle time limitations
Traffic conditions
Delays in delivery
And more
Based on these factors, managers can easily access insights through a staff location tracking software dashboard. They can also opt to generate custom data-driven reports for separate evaluation and comparison, whether it is for identifying reimbursement payroll, the effectiveness of the strategy, or ensuring driver safety measures.
3. Added Flexibility & Adaptability with Insights
When route planning is done manually, making last-minute changes or immediately adapting another action plan is difficult. However, with field employee GPS tracking software, making impromptu decisions is probable through seamless monitoring and access to insights in real-time.
Through field tracking software, managers can easily track traffic updates, weather conditions, employees' movements, and the probability of delivery delay in real time to streamline operations and access resource progress under one platform.
For instance, if there is a last-minute order request, then the system enables managers to identify the availability of employees in nearby locations and aids in assigning tasks through this software with detailed information. This added flexibility aids businesses in eliminating delivery delays and miscommunication, which leads to maximizing customer satisfaction.
Optimize Routes with TrackOlap’s Solution
Replacing manual planning with streamlined route planning through field tracking software offers seamless efficiency, savings in cost, enhancement of customers' trust and contentment, staying ahead of the competition with maintained services, and identifying opportunities through centralized data-driven software.
Do you want to learn more about the Live Tracking Tool? Contact us today or request a demo right away !