We're still planning delivery routes in spreadsheets and it's starting to become a mess. What used to take 15 minutes now turns into an hour of moving stops around and trying to figure out which driver should take what. Some days it feels like we're burning more fuel than necessary just because nobody has time to sit down and optimize everything properly. What are people using for route planning these days?

 

The spreadsheet thing falls apart fast once you've got more than a handful of stops, too many variables to juggle manually at that point. A lot of logistics teams have shifted to proper routing software that automatically factors in time windows, driver availability and live traffic. Something like OptimoRoute or Route4Me handles the heavy lifting and cuts planning time down significantly once you've got your stops loaded in.

 

Not everyone's ready to jump straight into a paid subscription before they've even seen what the difference looks like. You can check out this free route optimization software here: https://routing24.com/ . Plug in your stops, assign your drivers and it works out the optimized routes without all the back and forth. Worth running it against what you're currently doing just to see how much time you've actually been leaving on the table.