Anyone Can Use Route Optimisation with Route2GO Lite, it’s Easy!
Over the last couple of weeks, I have written about Route2GO Lite, which is a web based application which allows you to calculate the most cost effective order to make customer visits on the road. I talked about Furniture Stores and how they and other bulky goods retailers can get an immediate payback. I gave examples of added value things you can do such as creating a reverse order loading list for the truck and how to use a spreadsheet to calculate other factors such as estimated time on site for deliveries.
What is perhaps a little harder to get across is that this application is really simple to use. Large freight and distribution companies and service companies employ fleet controllers, dispatchers and other management staff and possibly highly skilled IT workers, who deal with things like route optimisation.
In New Zealand, most companies have very small fleets, ranging from 1 to 5 vehicles. They can’t afford to employ technical people and just want to get on with the job. The drivers will have key skills, for example a furniture delivery driver will know how to get in and out of tight spots, they’ll know how to carry furniture without damaging it or the house it is going into. They probably have good social skills and develop good relationships with customers. The problem though is that costs are going up and customers are expecting more for less. We have clients at the top end who have taken over smaller companies who can’t compete, those who don’t have an IT Department.
We have great news! You don’t need an IT Department. You don’t need to buy any software. All you need is access to a PC connected to the Internet and a browser, such as Firefox. That’s it, no special skills (correct spelling is helpful but we have some fuzzy logic), just a desire to improve efficiency, save some time and money and perhaps provide a better standard of service to your customers.
If you’re business is in New Zealand we invite you to give us a try. The best thing to do would be to give us a few lists of routes that have previously been driven, in the order they were done. That way we can give you the ability to evaluate the route based on the order we recommend. If you can put a dollar cost per driven km, you can calculate the immediate Return On Investment. Of course as per the previous links above, there are many more ways you can benefit from this product.
So here’s our offer: We will run up to 5 routes (Up to a maximum of 25 addresses per trip) for FREE. Our preference is for ones you have already driven so we can give you a real comparison. No risk or commitment required. If you are as excited about the result as we think you will be, we will invite you to set up an account with us. You can use it as often or as little as you like. There are no up front costs and no license fees. You only pay for what you use. In effect it is Software as a Service.
Why have we done this? The way I see it is that it is about working smarter rather than harder. You are good at what you do and we are good at our speciality which is mapping and everything to do with Location Based Services.We are a New Zealand owned company. We understand New Zealand business and New Zealand roads. We want to help New Zealand businesses achieve their goals by providing simple solutions that make a difference.
So why would you take us up on our free trial? I don’t know. I could think of lots of possible reasons, such as:
- Reduce costs and be more profitable
- Reduce stress by being able to deliver to your promise
- Be able to compete with bigger companies
- Have happy customers who keep coming back and buying or using more of your services
- Be able to do more jobs without increasing resources
- Not lose sales or work because you don’t have the ability to deliver quickly
- Work smarter rather than harder, rely on science instead of guesswork
- Find out if it is as easy as I say it is
- Have happier staff who know they can achieve what is expected of them
- Have customers who recommend you to their peers
I don’t know why you are in business. It could be to get rich, it might be so you can be your own boss, it could be for lifestyle. Whatever it is, we want to help. Why not contact us today on 09 966 8730 or email info@geosmart.co.nz.
What Tools Do You Need to Build a Mobile LBS Application Part 5
Route Optimisation
Time is a commodity you can’t buy more of, people are getting busier all the time. So far we have talked about being able to access and view a map, search for street addresses, Points of Interest and get driving directions to or from a location. We have looked at getting the coordinates of a location to display it on a map and we have looked at Reverse Geocoding to get the nearest street address to the location of a person or object.
The next thing is, what if you want to visit multiple locations on the same trip. You might be a merchandiser or service person with several visits to make and it doesn’t matter what order you do them in. You might be on holiday and wanting to explore the many attractions around you, or you could be visiting Open Homes.
It isn’t easy, looking at a map, to sort out what order to sort your visits into, you could get a pencil and a ruler and try to work out the route in your map book, or you could run your pen across the pages, as if completing a maze to sort out the order, but eventually you would have such a big mess that you would have to buy a new book. Of course this blog is about LBS, which typically means that we are developing applications for a mobile phone, that means that the user quite possibly doesn’t have a map book on them, or at the very least, doesn’t want to deface the book.
Here comes Route Optimisation, or as we call it at GeoSmart, Route2GO. Route Optimisation runs a very complex set of algorithms which look at every possible sequence of stops and comes up with the best order to do your visits. In its simplest form, it allows you to set your start and end points (which could be the same) and then tells you what order to make the visits in. The end result will be fewer kilometres travelled, less fuel, less time and less cost. This way of calculating is called The Travelling Salesman Problem. This concept is also great for people like the delivery truck for a furniture store. The optimised route tells the driver not only what order to do the deliveries in, but in reverse order, tells him how to load his truck so he doesn’t have to keep moving heavy objects around the truck, wasting time and energy and of course reduce carbon emissions and pollution.
There is also complex Route Optimisation. In this scenario there are all sorts of exceptions. For the purpose of this blog, we’ll keep it simple and limited to one day, because in a mobile situation, that’s probably all you would do, although of course you can do far more detailed planning in the office, for example a service manager could be planning how to meet their contractual commitments with multiple vehicles, multiple drivers, who don’t necessarily work on the same day and all sort of restrictions on the client side, such as day of the week, time of day etc. But I said I wouldn’t go into that.
Imagine you are in Queenstown on holiday and you are using one of the Proximity Based Marketing examples, we outlined for the Location Innovation Awards, where you want to visit multiple attractions. Some services like the Bungy Jump are a bit of a drive and others are close by, so you have logistical situations as to how to fit the most experiences into a day. But in order to do the jet boat ride and the Earnslaw cruise, there are time constraints and you have to be at certain places at certain times.
Imagine you are house hunting and a number of the properties you want to look at have Open Homes, which are on at different times.
Complex Route Optimisation would let you specify the times you have to be at certain places and also lets you set the amount of time you want to spend at each one. For Open Homes you might plan, say 15 minutes at each property, but the tourist activities have different times. The jet boat ride might be 45 minutes and the Earnslaw cruise an hour and a half. This tool would allow people to really get the most out of their day and at the same time drive the least distance, least time and cost for travel.
These web services are available as web services and can work very well on a mobile if the application is designed properly. Of course you could also use them on a web site and then have the results sent to the computer as SMS or perhaps a link that open the mobiles browser.
An application that provided these services would use a number of the tools we have previously discussed.
- You need to identify and geocode the locations to confirm where they are and enable the optimisation.
- You will want to be able to view the locations on a map to verify what is happening, both for confidence and comprehension.
- You will need to use the Points Of Interest Web Service to look up street addresses and a database (either your own, a custom one such as seen at Bayleys or Professionals Real Estate. or subscribing to some of the Point of Interest (POI) categories that GeoSmart offers which cover everything from geographical and historical to cafes, restaurants, attractions etc. You can see loyts of examples on AA Maps.
- The Directions API would be used once you had established the order of the locations you are visiting and can provide turn by turn driving directions on your mobile from a to b to c and so on.
Just as an aside, the GeoSmart POI database contains additional contact information including phone numbers, email, web site etc, where appropriate. This means that you can also provide links in the mobile application so that people could add information to the contact list in the phone, or the ability to directly call the number from the application, without having to memorise, or copy and save the number.
So now you have used a number of GeoSmart tools (web services and API’s) to create your mobile LBS application. GeoSmart has many more tools available and we don’t stop. Our guys are constantly coming up with new tools and applications. If you haven’t found everything you need to develop your application or concept on the Developer Page, leave a comment or question, or contact us by email at info@geosmart.co.nz.
This was the last blog in this series, but there are many more interesting concepts and stories to tell you about, so please keep coming back, bookmark the main blog page or subscribe using your favourite RSS Feeder. And please feel free to comment, it would be great to share your comments and ideas.
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