Descartes WinRoute™ - Route Planning Solution to Create Strategic Route Plans and Optimize Daily Deliveries

Descartes WinRoute™ uses advanced planning and optimization technologies to provide strategic route plans such as master routes and daily dynamic planning to help distribution and services businesses maximize the productivity of their fleets and resources. The easy-to-use solution was designed to help fleet operators determine the best way to organize their operations and run them daily.

Descartes WinRoute was designed to optimize distribution and service networks. Strategic route planning is different than daily route planning.

It has the potential to deliver even greater productivity and service improvements because strategic route plans address more fundamental change. In daily route planning, the strategies, policies and even the territories, frequencies and routes are already defined.

The goal of daily route planning is to do the best with those restrictions already in place. With strategic route planning customers, volumes, service policies, asset types and operational constraints can be treated as variables. Policies, practices, capacity etc. can be flexed to see what new or changed routing strategies and tactics will best address changes in demand or new business goals.

Strategic route planning applies not only to those fleets that run static or master routes, but also to dynamic routes. This type of route planning helps to model the policies and practices that dictate the daily routing parameters.

In addition, strategic route planning is an essential component in understanding the best approaches to enter new markets or consolidate acquisitions. Because, as demand changes and distribution organizations look at new markets, they will need to use the solution to help predict the costs and capacity required to move forward.

Descartes WinRoute uses single pass optimization for strategic route planning. Traditional optimization technology limitations force strategic route planners to a disconnected four-step approach: “cut territories”, “assign visit frequencies and service days”, “create routes” and “review the results and make changes”.

This tedious process made the strategic route planning process more of an art than a science because territory, frequency, service day and route configuration are interrelated. With Descartes WinRoute, single pass optimization, all four steps are considered at the same time and the system determines the service day.

This combination helps to ensure the most productive master routes while reducing the planning complexity and skills required and shortening the planning time.

Descartes WinRoute has comprehensive modelling capabilities that create optimal plans considering the unique requirements of the products being delivered, vehicles executing the deliveries, the company’s business strategies and policies and road network. It also takes into account fluctuating traffic conditions to produce delivery schedules that better reflect daily driving conditions.

A unique modelling example would be bulk deliveries with multiple and flexible compartments where the size of each compartment has to be determined to minimize the number of delivery vehicles required.

For customers with dynamic or hybrid distribution or service environments, Descartes WinRoute can take a constantly changing order mix and optimize delivery or service routes to reduce costs while ensuring customer service requirements (e.g. delivery windows) are met.

Descartes WinRoute is part of Descartes comprehensive routing, mobile and telematics solution suite. It can be used standalone or integrated with Descartes Route Planner™ for strategic route planning or Descartes Route Planner™ On-demand to for strategic route planning and advanced daily planning with integrated dispatch and tracking, mobile applications and telematics.

The solution can be deployed locally or in the cloud as part of an integrated suite. Connect with our team to learn more.