How To Optimize A Delivery Route Using Multi-Stop Routing Software

Optimizing a delivery route is key to improving delivery efficiency, reducing costs, and maximizing fleet capacity. Route optimization software allows you to plan the most effective sequence of stops based on driver availability, vehicle capacity, customer time windows, and other critical factors. With a multi-stop route planner like Route4Me, you can create smarter, faster, and more cost-effective delivery routes. Here’s how to optimize a delivery route in six simple steps.Optimize delivery routes by matching drivers, vehicles, and stops using a multi-stop route planner.

Table of Contents

 

1. Add Drivers And Vehicles To A Multi-Stop Route Planner

Start by create accounts for each delivery driver in your multi-stop route planner. This gives you visibility into availability, working hours, route performance, total stops visited, and distance driven.

Next, add your fleet vehicles, either by importing telematics data or creating vehicle profiles manually. Include details like vehicle type, loading capacity, cubic volume, and the number of packages each vehicle can carry. With all this data set up, your multi-stop route planner can optimize routes according to fleet capacity—allowing you to deliver more with fewer resources.

Create and manage a team of drivers, route planners, dispatchers, and managers in Route4Me's Last Mile Route Optimization Software.

 

2. Specify Vehicle Parameters And Driver Skills

If not already done, define each vehicle’s parameters and match drivers according to their skills and licenses. This is especially important for mixed fleets with vans, heavy-duty trucks, or special cargo vehicles.

For example, delivering large furniture requires a commercial vehicle and a CDL driver. The route planner ensures that each delivery route is assigned the right vehicle and driver without manual calculation, making it easier to optimize a delivery route efficiently.

Creating profiles for field service vehicles on field service management software with fleet management features

 

3. Upload Addresses For Multiple Stops

Next, upload cusomer delivery addresses from spreadsheets, cloud storage, or file transfer tools. The Route4Me multi-stop route planner allows bulk uploads from Google Drive, Dropbox, Xero, Box.net, and other services.

Centralizing all delivery addresses makes it much faster and easier to optimize a delivery route across multiple stops.

Transportation Cross-Docking Route4Me Route Planning and Optimization

 

4. Plan And Optimize Delivery Routes

After uploading your addresses, it’s time to plan the delivery route. A capable multi-stop route planner will automatically determine the most efficient sequence of stops based on your optimization criteria.

Route4Me offers options for:

By choosing the right settings, you can optimize a delivery route that meets your business and fleet requirements.

One unoptimized planned route on a map before route optimization next to another short and fast optimized route

 

5. Set Routing Constraints And Business Rules

To optimize a delivery route effectively, factor in customer and operational constraints such as:

Direct Store Delivery route planning with business routing rules and customer and fleet variables.

 

6. Dispatch Delivery Routes According To Skills And Fleet Capacity

Finally, assign optimized routes to drivers based on their skills and licenses, and pair them with the appropriate vehicle. Dispatching planned routes in this way ensures each route is completed efficiently, safely, and on time, whether it involves standard deliveries or special cargo.

 

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About author: Alex Yasko

Alex Yasko is the Go-to-Market Product Manager and Information Architecture Manager at Route4Me. With thousands of hours of experience, Alex specializes in breaking down complex last-mile optimization and routing scenarios into simple, actionable instructions, helping last-mile businesses streamline their operations effortlessly.

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Route4Me

About Route4Me

Route4Me has over 40,000 customers globally. Route4Me's Android and iPhone mobile apps have been downloaded over 2 million times since 2009. Extremely easy-to-use, Route4Me's apps create optimized routes, synchronize routes to mobile devices, enable communication with drivers and customers, offer turn-by-turn directions, delivery confirmation, and more. Behind the scenes, Route4Me's operational optimization platform combines high-performance algorithms with data science, machine learning, and big data to plan, optimize, and analyze routes of almost any size in real-time.