Route Optimization Software for Small Business: Twelve Stops, Two Vans, One Morning

A plumber with three vans, a bakery with two delivery routes, a florist on a Saturday: the routing problem is the same one large fleets solve, at a size where the owner has been solving it in their head. The stops for the day come in from a booking system, a spreadsheet or a phone; someone groups them by area and hands each driver a list; the drivers reorder it in the van. It works until the day has twelve stops and a time window, and the two vans cross each other's paths twice.

Twelve stops across a city, two vans, one with a 9-to-11 window and one customer who is not home before ten. Planned by hand along neighbourhood lines, the two routes ran 128 km and the last drop landed at 3:40 in the afternoon, with one van backtracking across town for the time window. The optimizer, given the same stops, the two vans and the two constraints, produced routes of 91 km finishing at 2:05, with the windowed stop placed second on the nearer van and the late customer last on the other. That is 37 km and an hour and a half of driver time saved on one ordinary day, which for a small business is a fourth van it did not have to buy.

Small-business routing tools are priced per driver or per vehicle per month, typically in the low tens of dollars, with a planning screen for whoever builds the day and a phone app for the driver with the stop list, navigation and proof of delivery. Connected to a GPS tracking platform such as MyGeotab through the Marketplace, the tool also knows where the vans are, so a stop added at eleven goes to the van that is actually closest, and the owner can tell a customer an ETA from the screen instead of calling the driver. Fleets already tracking their vans add routing as an app rather than a new system.

Ask whether it handles time windows and vehicle-specific rules, whether the driver app works offline, whether it imports stops from the booking or invoicing system the business already uses, whether it re-sequences during the day from live positions, and what happens to the price when the fleet grows from three vans to eight. High Point GPS sets up routing tools connected to MyGeotab for small fleets in Quebec, Ontario and the northeastern US, alongside the tracking device install.