At the National Beer Wholesalers Association convention this week, Telogis unveiled what it calls a “Route Planning Suite” for fleets to help craft a single “intelligence platform” dynamic routing, real-time work order management, commercial navigation, telematics and mobile integration services.
“What we’re trying to do is develop a series of interconnected modules that accommodate the different influences affecting fleet operations,” Newth Morris, president of Telogis’ route and navigation division, explained to Fleet Owner.
“Look at a beer distribution n company for example; they’re serving everything from grocery chains to single ‘mom and pop’ convenience stores,” he said. “So the route planning suite looks at the impact of delivery schedules to these different locations in terms of driver hours, miles, and on-time percentage. That data then improves planning for small loads versus bulk deliveries."
Morris added that Telogis’ platform approach aims to build a more productive and efficient fleet by combining strategic and dynamic planning, advanced mobile apps for logging hours of service (HOS) and other compliance requirements, while offering easy-to-build mobile forms, commercial navigation and telematics.
The Telogis Route Planning Suite supports static, fixed-route and territory planning as well as dynamic routing, too, so fleets can be more responsive and provide a higher level of service for their customers regardless of size or location. The modules within the new package include:
- Telogis Territory – a strategic planning tool that helps analyze and create specific, geo-fenced territories for delivery drivers, technicians or sales staff before performing any scheduling or route optimization, organized by geographic, non-geographic and hybrid territories.
- Telogis Schedule – a longer-term planning tool that can help make sense of complicated routes so changes can be more easily made to incorporate new customers or change time windows. It 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 – designed for daily operations teams, this module gives fleet managers a “day-ahead” view and allows them to review and revise last-minute changes and distribute the plans out to a team of delivery drivers for execution.
In particular, Morris stressed that the Route Planning Suite ensures that fleet route plans are built so that key customers are visited regularly while last-minute orders can be handled more efficiently – helping generate more revenue and boosting overall customer satisfaction.
“It’s about giving fleets the ability to take a strategic plan and make tactical day-to-day changes to it; all without losing the strategic focus on cost control and customer service,” Morris emphasized. “It allows for those critical ‘tweaks’ to be made without losing control of the overall plan.”
