Four in the afternoon at the transport desk
The transport planner has tomorrow's delivery notes in a pile, a whiteboard with the vehicles down one side and a map on the wall. The crane lorry can only do so many drops. The rigid with the tail lift is booked for the plasterboard. Two sites have a morning-only window, one has a weight limit on the road and one needs a call thirty minutes before. Late orders keep arriving from the counter. The plan gets rubbed out and redrawn three times.
When the planner is off sick, nobody else can do it as well, and the next day's runs show it.
Why a normal route planner does not fit
Consumer route tools optimise distance. A merchant's delivery plan is a puzzle about vehicles and site conditions, where distance is often the least important part.
| Constraint | Example | Where it lives today |
|---|---|---|
| Vehicle type | Crane offload, tail lift, flatbed, van | Planner's head |
| Payload | Blocks and aggregates hit weight before space | Rough judgement |
| Site window | Before 10am only, or not on Friday | Note on the order, sometimes |
| Access | Narrow lane, weight-restricted bridge | Driver's memory |
| Pre-call | Ring site manager thirty minutes out | Written on the ticket |
| Loading order | Last drop loaded first | Yard team works it out |
Because the constraints are not held as data, no tool can use them. The planner's head is the only system that can.
What it costs when the plan is wrong
Wrong-vehicle drops mean a second journey. Missed windows mean a site turns the lorry away. Overloaded runs start late and end in overtime. Customers ring to ask where their delivery is and the counter can't tell them. And planning itself eats two hours a day of one of your most experienced people.
The delivery planner we build
- Orders marked for delivery are read from your merchant system, with weights calculated from product data and the delivery address geocoded.
- Site rules are stored once per delivery address or customer: windows, access notes, vehicle restrictions and pre-call contacts. The planner is prompted to fill them in the first time a new site appears.
- Your fleet is set up with each vehicle's payload, offload equipment and working hours.
- The planner proposes runs per vehicle that respect those rules, using a routing engine for drive times, and shows why any order could not be fitted.
- Your transport planner drags drops between runs and locks anything they know better than the system does.
- Runs go to the drivers' phones in drop order, and the yard gets a loading list in reverse order.
We keep the transport planner in charge. The tool does the arithmetic and remembers the site rules. The person makes the calls that need local knowledge.
A calmer afternoon
Tomorrow's plan is a first draft by the time the planner sits down, and most of the work is checking it. Late orders drop into the plan with a warning if they break a constraint. The yard loads in the right order. When a customer rings, the counter can see which run their order is on and roughly when it is due.
Does your transport desk look like this?
- Planning tomorrow takes a couple of hours and one particular person.
- Site access notes live on paper tickets or in drivers' heads.
- Lorries go out with the wrong offload equipment for a drop.
- Loads are built by guesswork on weight.
- The counter can't tell customers when their delivery will arrive.