Monday the route ends at 2:30pm, but Tuesday it goes on until 6:30pm. What’s going on? Easily spot unbalanced work days using Fleet Management, by viewing the day-by-day breakdown on the “Routes” tab.
A customer calls in and wants a delivery, but you don’t want to pull your driver off-route. Make it a win-win for you and your customer. Customer Service “Schedule Appointment” instantly identifies which driver is in the area, providing great customer satisfaction while saving you time and expense.
Do your stop number go something like 10,22,50,51,52,70? Re-numbering them is a snap in Fleet Management and allows you’re the spacing to properly assign new customers.
Looking to get a file with your customers and their routing data? Symphony Enterprise makes it easy – sent right to your email address!
Do you suspect that you often have two drivers in the same area, but you’re not sure? Eliminate the doubt and see it at a glance. Symphony Enterprise Fleet Management automatically geocodes all of your customers to the map, letting you view territory boundaries, and overlap, at a depot or territory level.
You know you want to add customers, and it would be best to have them in concentrated, growing areas. Use your existing customer base as a template to focus your sales effort and saturate the best areas.
If you are reviewing a route or territory on the map, and want to share it or use it later, save it as a pdf file. In Symphony Enterprise, one of your printer selections is a pdf creator. It saves your map (or report) to your desktop so that you can view it, email it, […]
Sometimes a driver may complain that a certain route-day is overloaded, but only once or twice a month. Using Symphony Enterprise you can check out the product loads for upcoming delivery cycles well in advance of the actual delivery date. Fleet Management lets you view route statistics right down to a specific delivery date level.
With a lot of depots and routes, it is often too confusing to see all that data at once. So simplify your view. Symphony Enterprise lets you “filter” what you want to work with, conveniently hiding the other route information. Your maps are lots less cluttered and thus easier to understand. Just open Fleet Management, […]
Thinking about moving your depot or opening a new one? What’s the best location? Will I need fewer trucks? Fewer routes? Fleet Management scenarios let you simulate the impact on your routes and drivers – without disturbing your operation. You can create multiple scenarios to compare and contrast, and pick your best option.
Do you ever get a call from your driver while he’s on his on route: “Hey, I can’t find ABC Company?” Rather than having him hunt around (with your truck and fuel!) locate it in seconds. Better yet, Symphony Enterprise lets ANYONE in your office handle that call.
Do you have customers with special hours for delivery? Who knows that – your driver? Maybe? Maintain all of that data systematically, for all of your customers. Symphony Enterprise Customer Service Pin Customers let you manage and report on business hours and blackout times for your whole customer base.
Another new sale – great! But who should deliver it, and when? Put away your guesswork AND your wall map – Symphony Enterprise pinpoints routing suggestions for you – right down to the best stop number. It takes less than a minute, and anyone in your office can do it.
Do you have a new or substitute driver? Help them complete the day on time by providing a printed Route Book with map segments, listed customers, and turn-by-turn driving directions. Simply select the route-date you want, and there you are – as current as your own customer data.
Chris Sciora is the founder and CEO of MobileIQ, a leading provider of fleet management and customer service solutions for fleet-centric companies. Over the past 15 years Chris has worked as a professional in the mapping/GIS industry, conceived and built several highly successful fleet management software solutions, and served as a fleet and routing expert […]
This is when the new routes will start running. Everything else in the game plan schedule works backwards from this date, so it’s critical to write it down and share it with everyone. Some people prefer Monday, some prefer Friday. It really makes no difference what day of the week is selected as long as […]
Before getting started, establish clear goals for the project. You might be interested in reducing overtime, balancing out workload between route days, eliminating trucks or just simply cleaning up route overlap. Problems are guaranteed to arise when one or more goals conflict with each other. Making decisions up front – and writing them down – […]
My Calendar is an upcoming Headlight feature designed to reduce inbound calls, improve delivery rates and leverage email communication. Delivery customers can view their schedule online, print a 12 month calendar, sign up for automated reminders and more. It includes a dedicated web page for collecting email addresses and easily handles thousands (or tens of […]
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These 14 Secrets of Smarter (Not Harder) Route Balancing came from the toughest and best kind of teacher: real world experience. If you have been a part of even one route balancing project, you probably already know a lot of these critical steps. But unless you’ve done hundreds of these types of projects, chances are […]
Route Balancing workshop with Chris Sciora and Greg James (audio only)
Lastly, give yourself a break. It’s natural for people to focus on the unusual situations – those twelve customers that refuse to change days, one high volume delivery each week, lack of parking on one route every Friday. With thousands of deliveries each month, it’s rare for any of those to be significant enough to […]
Tell customers in advance about potential route day changes and the phone will ring less after Go Live. Promise. And if you also send out route calendars with the new delivery schedules, it will hardly ring at all. Promise. Another good idea is to use a 3rd party service instead of doing it yourself. It’s […]
Most companies only assign route and day. The drivers are expected to sequence the stops throughout the day and maintain the system. It just doesn’t happen. When going through a comprehensive route balancing, take a little extra time and sequence each customer. The fleet mileage and hours will be much lower as a result.
One critical aspect of changing route days is making sure the customer doesn’t run out of product. If their delivery day is being moved later in the cycle, it’s important to leave extra water or salt before the change takes place. A simple rule of thumb is to double the average delivery, but that almost […]