How to compare routes by rates and find the most effective strategy?

With the Track-POD powerful routing engine, you can get a clear idea of your transportation expenses as Track-POD calculates the cost of routing and keeps the log for you to analyze the expenditures and select the best strategy for your business.

Follow these easy steps to set up routing cost:

Step 1. Go to Settings -> Routing and Optimization and set your Routing strategy and Route rates. These values will be applied by default in your Routing.

Note: Base fare may be used as the cost of hiring a third-party vehicle.

Step 2. You can also set specific route rates for your vehicles in Directories -> Vehicles -> Edit Item -> Route rates tab.

Step 3. Now with your route rates specified, you can start Automated Routing to allocate your orders to the fleet of vehicles. Once the routing is completed a pop-up window with the routing summary appears on the dashboard. 

As you see the Routing summary includes the following data:

- the Strategy selected in Routing and Optimization settings

- the number of vehicles 

- the total duration of all routes

- the total distance of all routes

- the total number of sites including warehouses

- the total number of orders allocated to the vehicles

- the cost based on the specified Route rates.

You can switch to another routing strategy and compare the results and the cost. For Expenses, the summary will be the following:

Note: remember that the routing based on expenses ignores most of the pre-set restrictions such as time slots, the maximum work time or distance and can be limited only by the number of stops per route.

Step 4. Compare your routing results and select the best option for you in the Routing History which you can find in the History tab of the Routing window.