Field service management is a task filled with lots of responsibilities. One needs to take care of the workforce balance, multiple levels of interaction, customer expectations as well as self profitability. Such multi-tasking comes with huge chances of ending up making mistakes. Now, this is what one can sometimes not afford at all. That is why you now have the chance to use the trucking dispatch software. It will not only help you deliver better quality but also help avoid making those mistakes to gain better profits.

Let us come to know about the mistakes often made and how the route planning app can support you in getting you rid of common and uncommon mistakes. Here you go:   

Use of pen and paper for planning the routes

Using pen and paper refers to manual route planning. This, as you should know, is time-taking and highly inaccurate at times. This develops the need for a means to come to accurate, quick and more proper route plans.

That is the reason why this trucking dispatch software got introduced to meet the requirement. It will help you with the following point benefits:

  •  Hundred percent accurate results in route planning.
  •  Your route gets planned within a minute, which is highly less time consuming, when compared with manual planning.
  • Assurance of your field apps following the routes properly.
  • Assurance that the drivers do not engage themselves in road rage.
  • A greater level of efficiency while dealing with different customer disputes.

So you must now be able to understand what mistake it would be to do manual route planning. The tool can very well serve your field service organization with freedom from traffic, left turns and bad weather conditions. So, now one can be free of delay in visits and worries about the same.

Confusion on choosing the right s0ftware for trucking dispatch

Trucking software

Next, we come to a common phenomenon, where companies apply their personal business optimization software. This can be a good idea, but not when despite this they face losses and pay heavily for the software. This is more common when using the wrong multi-stop route planner with limited features, such as lack of vehicle location tracking capabilities.

Let us go through the benefits of a web-based map route planner. The list will surely convince you of its potential for being a perfect route planning software. The benefits are as follows:

  •         Allows you to access it from any location at any time.
  •         It does not ask for installation due to the fact that it’s based on the cloud.
  •         Offers you a pay per usage pricing model.
  •         It offers scalability.
  •         Last but not least, it allows you to integrate it with the other software.

You also receive the facility of automatic data backups from the trucking software.

All the above-mentioned benefits are possible only when the software comes with route planning offering both vehicle tracking as well as route scheduling in one package. The absence of a single package can be bad for your pockets.

Evaluation of your own capabilities before finalizing the expansion

No matter what kind of work we talk of, choosing expansion beyond our capabilities is no good for an organization. Similarly, you can grow your business only when the responsibilities taken and capabilities match. Choosing a new client requires you to already do your study about your abilities.

Now, we come to the scheduling software for service companies. The software helps you tackle several doubts. You may have questions such as should you go with hiring more field reps or drivers, or how much profit you can expect from every new order. There can be doubts regarding the extra time you will need for servicing new orders and regarding costs to manage visits, wages and fuel.

Let us come to how the trucking software can help you with this situation. In such a scenario, the software helps in the creation of mock routes and by adding relevant constraints for all new destinations. In fact, the software even allows you a multiple destination route planner with a colour coding feature to help you prioritize your leads

    Ignorance to real data

As we know, field service organizations generate a huge amount of data about territories, employees, routes and assets. Now, this can be helpful if taken in the right direction. It can be a good opportunity to fix loopholes. Here are some ways the vehicle routing software’s reporting and analytics feature can help:

  •         It facilitates you with all information regarding the operation performance.
  •         Helps you letting you track expenses.
  •         Enables you to identify the bottlenecks and refine your service delivery effectively.

Again, below are some of the detailed data you receive from the fleet routing software:

  •         Total stops made and total time taken.
  •          Routes completed a day and total stops made a day.
  •         Total distance covered with reference to the planned distance.
  •          Gas cost and average trip gas cost.
  •         Lastly, the average time you spent on a site compared with the allocated time.

 

 Balancing workload

This is about work allocation to your workforce or employees in an organized way. It can be one of the biggest mistakes to not take employee safety seriously, finally angering them.

A routing program uploads a list of customer addresses into the software. It then adjusts a few parameters and workload is automatically distributed among the field service reps by the trucking dispatch software. So you need not have to worry about employee productivity or underwork.

Conclusion

In brief, the trucking dispatch software will help you with equal workload distribution, while the dynamic routing tool will assist you with the evaluation of capacity before expansion. While the cloud-based trucking software will offer more benefits than legacy software, the software can overall save you from being inefficient.

Also, let your clients be up to date with the status of their inbound visits through the route planners offered to them. Such a customer portal feature in software can help in the reduction of the administrative as well as customer service burden of any field service organization. Customers do not wait for you to correct your mistakes, so it is better you do not make any of them.