SaaS-ifying logistics

More and more people are shopping online they say: a shift of emphasis away from visiting shops which brings with it an important change in mobility requirements. For while people may be travelling to shops less often, the corollary is that the goods they buy are, as a consequence, having to be moved to their locations.

The logistics of home delivery is becoming a significant component of every business activity these days.

So the arrival of the Route Planning Suite as a major enhancement of the SaaS-based Platform for Managing Sales, Deliveries and Field-Based Workers developed by Telogis, may be welcome for many companies.

It should certainly be a boon for businesses currently pondering an investment in on-premise versions of such an application, particularly amongst the SME community, where fast response and delivery can be a real factor in gaining traction in the marketplace.  

The Route Planning Suite provides a single, integrated location intelligence platform for companies that require dynamic routing, real-time work order management, commercial navigation, telematics and mobile integration services for their workforces in the field.

It provides customers with a seamless, integrated SaaS solution on which to build more productive, and efficient fleet management, combining strategic and dynamic planning, advanced mobile apps that log delivery drivers’ Hours of Service (HOS) and other compliance requirements, plus easy-to-build mobile forms, commercial navigation and telematics.

The company’s approach to the Route Planning Suite supports static, fixed-route and territory planning as well as dynamic routing. This enables Telogis customers to be more responsive and provide a higher level of service for their own customers. It also ensures that plans are built so that key customers are visited regularly and operations teams can more effectively manage last-minute orders, resulting in increased efficiency, revenue and overall customer satisfaction.

“Whether companies are making hundreds of service calls a day or delivering products and services to customers within a small area, Telogis can help organisations manage all field resources including sales, delivery drivers and merchandisers,” said Newth Morris, president, Telogis Route and Navigation.”

The Route Planning Suite consists of three main components. Telogis Territory provides the tools required to effectively plan, analyse and create specific, geo-fenced territories for delivery drivers, technicians or sales staff before performing any scheduling or route optimisation. Territory examines all of a company’s set jobs or deliveries plus relevant details for the jobs. It also defines optimal groups – organised by geographic, non-geographic (filters) and hybrid territories.

Once the groups are defined, it optimises them, making the data easier to analyse and a customers’ mobile resources easier to schedule.

Telogis Schedule functions as long-term planning tool, helping users make sense of complicated routing matrices. Customers are able to easily modify jobs, incorporate new customers, change time windows and multi-day routes plus label and recycle routes with a new, built-in Master Route capability.

Schedule also enables customers to custom-tune their long-term routing plans to include the inevitable variations that take place in day-to-day operations such as holidays and seasonal ebbs and flows.

Telogis Plan is designed for the daily operations team, giving them a day-ahead view which allows them to review and revise last-minute changes and distribute the plans out to a team of delivery drivers for execution.

The customisable day-ahead view helps companies organise what can be the chaos surrounding last-minute routing changes. Working at the depot level, Plan helps customers achieve optimised, balanced and on-time routes which often result in higher productivity, better customer satisfaction and greater profitability.