As an increasing number of people now work and live in more diverse locations post COVID and the demand for home delivery and onsite services has risen in parallel, more organizations find themselves looking for assistance solving the vehicle routing problem (VRP). VRP is the omnipresent dilemma of finding a set of optimized routes for a fleet of vehicles that minimizes travel times or distances. OnTerra Systems’ RouteSavvy API PLUS combines Microsoft Maps APIs with their own proprietary algorithms to make optimized route planning easy and offers an essential set of fleet optimization features for small business to large companies.
Multi-vehicle route optimization is a proven approach to enhancing logistical efficiency and decreasing expenses for organizations that handle deliveries, pickups, service calls, and site visits. Regardless of whether you are a business or a non-profit organization, minimizing service costs while maximizing customer satisfaction can be challenging, particularly when managing numerous customer visit locations across your fleet of drivers each day.
As an example, let’s take a medium-sized organization that for a given workday has 1,000 customer site visits to complete and has 50 service delivery drivers spread across a defined geographic area. How do you decide which service delivery drivers should be assigned to which customer site visits? Which vehicles can deliver goods or services to those sites? Will someone be at that receiving location when the driver gets there? These are some of the critical elements to solve with any VRP solution.
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Example of RouteSavvy API PLUS optimized routes for three vehicles and 125 stop locations displayed on a map using the Azure Maps web SDK.
Factoring in business requirements and customer constraints
Remember that question, will someone be there when I deliver the goods or services? Optimized routes can factor in multiple availability time windows for visit locations, such as customer hours of operation so you don’t leave valuable deliveries unattended and helps ensure someone can let you into a property if you need to complete a scheduled service. It can also consider driver availability times, such as when any driver shift starts and ends as part of the itinerary plan so both the driver and customer will be available to make sure important service delivery happens.
RouteSavvy API PLUS + Microsoft Maps, better together
While RouteSavvy API PLUS can be used on its own, there are several Azure Maps services that can be used in combination with RouteSavvy API PLUS to provide even greater capabilities to your route planning and optimization needs. Here are a few Azure Maps features to highlight that can be used to enhance your VRP solution:
Address geocoding: For a VRP solution, visit locations and driver start/end locations in the API request use latitude/longitude coordinates. If you don’t have your location data formatted as latitude/longitude coordinates, you can use the Azure Maps Search Service to geocode your street address data before . Azure Maps offers highly accurate street address geocoding capabilities that are compatible with RouteSavvy API PLUS.
Map overlays: The Azure Maps Web SDK is a great map canvas to help your back office and drivers see the routes on a map as part of your route planning process or while the routes are being driven. Azure Maps satellite and aerial imagery can also provide drivers with additional context about customer visit locations such as where parking areas and building entrances are and any other physical landmarks that can quickly help drivers find their destination.
Weather info: Azure Maps Weather Services can be combined with a VRP solution like RouteSavvy API PLUS to provide your drivers with useful weather insights that can help them be prepared for extreme weather conditions that may impact customer visits on the route itineraries. Specifically, Severe Weather Alerts, Daily Forecasts and Weather Along a Route are some of the Azure Maps Weather features that can be useful in preparing for weather-related obstacles on your routes.
Getting started with RouteSavvy API PLUS
Migrating from the Bing Maps Multi-Itinerary Optimization API to RouteSavvy API PLUS is relatively easy, especially with the RouteSavvy API PLUS team at OnTerra Systems ready to assist you. RouteSavvy API PLUS offers a free trial and can be purchased via OnTerra Systems, Azure Marketplace or Microsoft AppSource.
For more information and RouteSavvy API PLUS technical documentation, please visit the OnTerra Systems RouteSavvy API PLUS website.
Erik Lindeman is the Director of Product Management & Professional Services at OnTerra Systems. He has over 20 years of experience delivering web-based software services and solutions to enterprise customers at Microsoft and now leads Product Management, Consulting and Solution Development Services at OnTerra Systems.
