Route planning is the process of deciding which jobs a vehicle will visit in a day, in what order, and by which roads, so that drive time and distance fit inside the working day and the promised arrival windows.
How route planning is measured
The basic numbers are drive per job and how much of the day the drive consumes.
Drive per job = Total route drive time ÷ Jobs on the route
Drive share = Total drive time ÷ (Total drive time + Total on-site time)
Say a route has 5 jobs, 6 hours on site and 2.5 hours of driving. Drive per job is 30 minutes and drive share is 2.5 ÷ 8.5 = 29%. Re-ordering the same five stops might cut drive to 2 hours. Swapping one far-off job for a nearby one might cut it to 1.25. The second change is bigger, and it is a booking decision, not a routing one.
Why it matters
Route planning is often treated as the place where drive time gets fixed. It can help: ordering stops to avoid backtracking is a real saving. But the planner works with the jobs already promised, at the times already promised. If Tuesday has a 9:00 window on the north side and a 10:00 window on the south side, no ordering makes that efficient.
That is the difference between planning a route and building a schedule that can be routed. Route optimization software automates the ordering. Checking travel when each job is booked decides whether a good route is even possible. The trade-off is laid out in Route optimization vs. feasible scheduling.
CrewLink works at booking time. It computes the drive from where the truck will actually be, the previous job, before a slot is offered, so the day it builds is already a sensible route. See dispatch software.
A common mistake
Planning routes on straight-line distance. Ten miles across town at 5:00 p.m. is not the same as ten miles on an open highway at 10:00 a.m. Use road travel times, and where you can, adjust for time of day.
Related terms
- Route optimization is the automated version of route planning.
- Multi-stop route is the kind of route most service trucks run.
- Schedule density measures how tightly jobs are clustered on a route.
Common questions
What is the difference between route planning and route optimization?
Route planning is the task; route optimization is software that searches for the best order automatically. Both start from jobs already booked.
When should routes be planned?
Many companies plan the night before and adjust during the day. Checking travel when jobs are booked makes that nightly plan simpler.
Can route planning shorten arrival windows?
Only partly. Windows depend on the schedule being feasible from the start, which is decided when each job is booked.