The order is ready. Now it just has to get there.

Orders become routes

Line items from different jobs are combined into transports, and transports into routes. That way not every order is driven separately: whatever is going the same way anyway travels together.

A route carries its destinations in an order, with time windows. A map view shows which customers lie close together, so the order does not depend on the local knowledge of the driver.

Vehicles are kept with capacity and payload. Which one is suitable follows from those details rather than from an estimate at the loading bay. Driving licence details of the drivers are held and taken into account when staffing.

An overview of unscheduled line items shows what is not yet assigned to a route. Nothing is left standing because nobody scheduled it.

Vehicle and driver are resources

A vehicle is a resource and is planned as one, and so is a driver. Both have to be available, and both hang on the same availability overview as staff and equipment.

Dispatch answers before you commit whether the date can be held at all. The bar chart lays jobs and line items across time, so overlaps show up before two routes need the same vehicle.

Approved absences take effect on staffing immediately. Whoever is on holiday is not in the route plan.

That makes route planning not a separate calendar beside the business, but the same plan from which times and costs also arise.

The route hangs on the warehouse, and the feedback on everything else

The best route is worth little if the material is not on the vehicle. The packing list shows what has to be prepared, picking runs line by line and is confirmable by barcode. Loading and unloading stay traceable.

Recording does not stop outside. Staff can access the information they need for their job on a mobile device, whether it is a delivery, a collection, a service call, an installation or a stock count, and add on site whatever belongs to it.

And there is not good internet everywhere. Warehouses, cellars, building sites and event grounds have dead spots exactly where the work happens. The data needed can therefore be loaded onto the device before the job, and as soon as there is a connection again the information is reconciled with the central system.

The report back is the trigger for everything that follows. Perhaps the invoice can now be written. Perhaps a hire item is available again. Perhaps a fault was found. Logistics is therefore not the end of the chain but the point where the plan meets reality and comes back again.