When it comes to assuring on-time and cost-effective delivery, route planning is critical. However, designing effective routes is difficult. As a result, businesses of all sizes are adopting advanced route planning software.
Before we go into the specifics of such software, let's first define what it is and why it's vital.
Businesses need route planning software to decrease the number of miles driven to accomplish delivery, lowering fuel consumption expenses and carbon footprint.
About Norma
Norma is an AI-based route optimization software which is developed by Softec Technologies. It is an intelligent Route Optimizer enabling you to optimize your daily delivery routes with Artificial Intelligence and ensure compliance with time windows and business rules at the lowest cost.
1. Optimization of daily fleet routes and schedules
The process of determining the best cost-effective route for a given destination point while taking into consideration all intermediate stops is known as fleet route optimization. Although it may appear simple at first sight, it is more involved than just locating the shortest route on a map.
Norma combines route optimization with prediction, it processes delivery orders based on target optimization objectives, capacity constraints, business rules, traffic rules, and traffic predictions to calculate the best-optimized delivery routes.
The core of Norma is the algorithm that runs the input and connects to external data systems to retrieve information such as road network maps and traffic predictions to efficiently and quickly return the best-case delivery plan. It allocates resources to optimized routes, plans for capacity allocation across the fleet, and provides an advanced analysis.
2. Maximization of utilization and efficiency
Fuel wastes most of a fleet's running costs. A route planning optimization software like Norma will help you cover less distance and hence use less fuel. Better vehicle utilization means using fewer vehicles, resulting in lower fuel costs.
Norma assigns the generated routes to the available vehicles and postpones the failed plan due to a shortage of available resources to be planned automatically in the next batch of orders.
Norma will help you in increasing vehicle usage and a more balanced number of deliveries per driver to meet scheduling breaks.
3. Automation instead of manual planning
Manual route planning wastes and consumes time, especially when there are a significant number of routes to plan and schedule.
The ability to automate route planning allows the plan to be rapidly changed to deal with sudden changes to the schedule, such as unexpected increases in volume of orders or unexpected changes in available resources.
The key advantages of automated route planning systems are that they save time and concentrate on a particular component, such as cost or service.
Norma is an intelligent route planning assistant that helps you in optimizing your daily routes or dynamically re-routing in real-time and will let you avoid the hassle of manual route planning.
4. Impressive customer experience
Automating Last-mile delivery can help you avoid delivery delays and negative customer feedback.
An AI-based route optimization software, like Norma, assists you in planning the best routes for successful fleet management and on-time delivery as Customer orders are pushed through the integration layer and/or added manually through the control tower.
The system maintains a configuration to automatically gather the ready-to-dispatch orders based on its requested delivery time with your customers and send them to Norma AI algorithm to generate the best-case delivery plan taking into consideration the currently available resources (vehicles and couriers).
Norma automatically converts addresses into locations, allowing you to quickly solve location issues.
5. Assurance of delivery times
Delivery timings and customer service are connected in logistics since the eventual consumer's experience depend on the on-time delivery. Furthermore, having business or corporate experience converted into good customer service is currently one of the keys to competitiveness.
Norma uses accurate analytics and data, as well as the ability to monitor shipping history and operations, to reduce logistical costs and shipment delivery times. You can guide Norma to utilize the whole available time and allowed distance in visiting the delivery location and don’t worry about the driving time and distance back to the depot.
Conclusion
Logistics companies may boost their profitability by optimizing their delivery routes. Norma will help your logistics operations to optimize daily fleet routes and schedules, maximize utilization and efficiency, hassle-free manual planning, impressive customer experience, and assurance of delivery times.
The end result of "asking Norma" is a minimization of costs per mile, maximization of orders on-time delivery, and significant cost savings on planning, putting into consideration mixed fleets and the overall capacity portfolio of the organization. It also adheres to customer deadlines and delivery time windows for enhanced customer experience.
NORMA can be used standalone, but also quickly connected to your existing systems using APIs.
For more information on how Norma can impact your logistics operations, feel free to request a one-to-one live demo, and one of our experts will be happy to call you back to discuss your requirements in detail.