With the emergence of numerous logistics companies such as Ofoods, JumiaFoods, Muve.ng and many others offering quick delivery services to B2B & B2C companies, route planning then becomes essential particularly in a major city like Lagos. Due to numerous traffic around various parts of Lagos. Smart route planning has many key advantages. One, it keeps customers happy as their goods arrive on time, resulting in better customer satisfaction ratings. It also helps keep fuel costs under control, and your fleet drivers and vehicles safe.
Why Missed ETAs?
Unplanned Traffic Congestion
In major cities around the world like Lagos, there are a lot of elements that make planning routes difficult or could alter your plans once your vehicles are on the road. One of such element obviously is unplanned traffic congestion. While sometimes you might be able to gauge the traffic on a particular route at certain times of the day, adapting to unexpected unplanned traffic can be difficult. For instance road diversions, accidents and road projects can disrupt your schedule.
Act of God
Uncontrollable natural events could also be a potential disruptor. Heavy downpours, flood, fog, snow, fire, etc.. could force your drivers to either try alternate route or slow down thus increasing pickup, delivery or arrival time.
Drivers
A recent study revealed that drivers are the most important asset in fleet management and they play a key factor in successful fleet logistics operation. Many times, drivers are not equipped with adequate tools and knowledge on the optimized route to reach their destination. Yet most fleet managers are frustrated with the inability of the drivers to meet the delivery schedule set for them.
Manual Route Planning
Many options are available to manually plan your delivery route and most likely avoid the various elements that can cause delays. For instance, you can follow up on traffic radios in real-time to learn about traffic situations, speak with local authorities to find out what road renovation projects are ongoing and thus avoiding potential delays. You can also obtain weather reports using various weather apps and other channels. For your driver, you can periodically advise them on the best route to get to their destination on time.
Plan your route manually could be beneficial as described above, but it has its own pitfalls. Frequently sourcing information with regards to road construction projects, weather reports and other acts of God can be time-consuming and thus disrupt your team from focusing on the core of the business. And even the gathered information can become unreliable if something unexpected happens.
What’s New In Route Planning?
Smart technologies are now available to simplify and improve fleet management operations and logistics planning. Implementing a fleet management system can help in automating your workflow, provide visibility and control thereby resulting in reduced costs, improved efficiency and management decision making.
A telematics and fleet management system such as INSTANTA uses a comprehensive network of traffic data and advanced algorithms to keep drivers on the quickest routes via route mapping, thereby saving fuel costs and improving your ETAs. INSTANTA Eco-Driving feature updates fleet managers with realtime reports on drivers’ movement and behavior behind the wheel. This visibility over your drivers’ movement gives you confidence that they are following the defined and safest route.
Finally, INSTANTA has other features such as:
- Live location tracking and traffic monitoring
- Trip reporting and fuel consumption by norm
- Drivers’ behavior monitoring and Eco-driving
- IOS and Android Apps for mobile monitoring
- Custom alert rules and notifications via SMS and Email
- Remote vehicle shutdown (Immobilization)
- 24/7 remote support (email and phone)
- Geofencing and point of interest
- Task management and route planning
- Maintenance scheduling and notification
- Vehicle and driver database
- Create multiple user accounts
- Create multiple vehicle groups and tags
- Multiple maps support
Click here to request a demo for the Instanta Telematics solution.
