Manual route planning, on whiteboards or Excel spreadsheets, is still very much used by building supply distributors due to the industry’s complex routing constraints and the need for specialized delivery equipment and vehicles to ensure the job gets done. Conveyor or boom trucks may be used for offloading product onto rooftops. Trucks with cranes might be used for delivering to smaller job sites, and flatbeds with forklifts can be used for delivering right to the ground at sites with no docks.
Whiteboards on the wall of a dispatch office or local spreadsheets are an antiquated planning approach that can create a massive bottleneck for organizations. A manual planning approach, while effective, is inefficient and suffers from possible mistakes either from transposing order information to the board or planning in a less than optimal manner.Â
Utilizing routing and scheduling solutions ensures the dispatcher knows the equipment type and delivery constraints required for an order, and dramatically reduces the number of delivery attempts required to get the product to a crew, therefore saving a company time and monetary resources. What if that same solution provided real-time visibility for all key stakeholders at any given moment? This could ensure that the entire organization was on the same page and also reduce wasted hours in phone calls and back and forth in planning and re-routing manually.
The Appian solution from Trimble MAPS includes an electronic route calendar, essentially an electronic version of this whiteboard or spreadsheet. The electronic route calendar allows dispatchers to quickly view asset and driver availability, track route progress and updated ETAs, and provide visibility of line item detail on unloaded orders for proper route placement all on one screen.Â
In addition, sales can reserve a boom truck for a priority customer while waiting for the order and customer service can also view the calendar in real- time to get updates on route status and when orders will be delivered, reducing calls to dispatch.Â
The entire delivery process encompasses dispatch, visibility, out of cab workflows, and more. Choosing the right tool, built specifically for the industry that provides an end-to-end workflow, will help organizations meet the challenges created with rising demand.
