Vehicle Tracking System vs Route Planning and Scheduling Application

Any company with a fleet of vehicles wants to decrease costs on fuel and then profit. Generally, companies spend lots of money for vehicle tracking systems to cut expenses on fleet distances. However, it is very important that good planning helps companies to minimize their transportation costs and decrease mileages. When companies decrease distance for vehicles, they may also save environment with decreasing fuel. Companies try to solve that problem using vehicle tracking system in general. Companies believe that, having a vehicle tracking system installed in your fleet can significantly reduce the operational costs.

Surely, companies believe that tracking systems can reduce fuel costs in a number of ways which also brings additional benefits to your company. Moreover, when a vehicle tracking system is used, it transmits data and information about the location, speed, and status of the vehicle. Then, this information can be used to report analytics of the performed transportation activities.

Although there are some advantages of using vehicle tracking system, vehicle tracking systems are not enough to lower costs and to increase efficiency. Because, vehicle tracking systems do not give you an optimum plan, they just measure what’s going on. Vehicle tracking systems only provide information about vehicles and they help to keep their vehicles under control, or to track how the operation goes. They cannot give you optimized route plans or task schedules.  If the transportation (delivery/pick-up orcustomer visits) are not planned optimally, or planned inefficient, or manually, vehicle tracking systems won’t be so much useful in decreasing costs.

Companies should know that vehicle tracking systems only control vehicles during operation goes on. In order to increase efficiency, decrease costs and save time, route planning software should be used before using vehicle tracking systems. Route planning and schedulingapplications help you create optimum route plans and fleet schedules for all of the orders (delivery/pick-up, customer visits, etc.). They are also called by one of the following terms: vehicle route planner, vehicle routing software,routing optimization application, vehicle route optimization software, vehicle routingand scheduling, application, etc.

Companies that have fleet must operate optimum routes for those vehicles. Vehicle routing and scheduling applications are used to plan fleet route and schedule your orders, and gives you step by step delivery/pick-up/service directions before any operation. In this way, your business can decrease costs, save time while increasing efficiency in your operations.

In order to cut transportation & operational expenses, optimum routes, fleet tasks with step by step directions and to maximize customer satisfaction, a route planner should be used.

We want to increase awareness about route planning and scheduling applications in order to make organizations more efficient and so that they can serve much more customers at the same time. In this way they can profit more. We have a suggestion for companies that they should use vehicle tracking system with route planner software. In this way, they get an optimum route plan and then they can control vehicles using vehicle tracking system. They can measure their planned operation when applying to their vehicles. If they realize that they cannot be efficient enough, they can change their strategy. In this way, organizations create a chance to progress themselves continuously.

We would like to specify that we do not only emphasize to use route planner. Surely, they can use also vehicle tracking but there is an important point that we point out; vehicle tracking systems can be more effective after planning which is optimizing fleet routes, scheduling orders. Nowadays, vehicle tracking system manufacturers try to create perception on people’s mind that vehicle tracking systems reduce costs. However, it should be known that using vehicle tracking system will be not effective without route planningand scheduling.

There is another issue: Prices of those systems and their return on investment. Generally, organizations believe that using vehicle tracking system is not expensive as much as using route planner. It is absolutely wrong belief. We give our users an example to prove this belief is not true.

Let’s do simple math on a sample company case:

• Let’s say a company has 20 vehicles.
• Each vehicle’s distance is 20 km per day.
• Assume 10 km costs $1 fuel.
• So, 12000 km per month. 
• $1200 per month just for fuel.

Case 1: Company using only vehicle tracking system:

• At minimum, company spends $10 for each vehicle monthly for vehicle tracking system.
• So, vehicle tracking system costs the company $200 per month. 

Question:

• What will this company save on costs?
• Most probably, the answer is nothing.
• Can this company profit $200 by using vehicle tracking system only?
• Most probably, the answer is no. That amount may not be covered.

Case 2: Company using a route plannerapplication:

• Using logvrp, decreases costs around 20%.
• So, company can save approximately $240 per month.

As a result, if you use vehicle tracking system, you should also use route planning to be more efficient and effective and to reach more customers while maximizing customer satisfaction. It is certain that you may profit with using logvrp whether you use vehicle tracking or not. As a brief, think once more if you say: “I don’t need route planning. I already have a vehicle tracking system and I profit”

logvrp also helps you to:

• Decrease costs
• Save time
• Reduce mileages
• Increase customer satisfaction

Vehicle Route Planning and Scheduling Made Easy

Nowadays, optimization became crucial in most business sectors, but theoretical results do not find practical implementations in technology so fast to be used by real life business. This work is one of the rare examples of multidisciplinary work which combines the new theoretical results and implements the practical application of optimization methods. This paper presents a computational implementation of some vehicle routing problems (VRP), mainly on pickup and delivery problems, introduces recent theoretical results put forward by a survey on types of VRPs and explains the features of the software implemented based on the research.

The vehicle routing problem (VRP) is a combinatorial optimization and nonlinear programming problem seeking to service a number of customers with a fleet of vehicles. Proposed by Dantzig and Ramser in 1959, VRP is an important problem in the fields of transportation, distribution and logistics. [cf. wikipedia.org]

The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well known problem in operational research where customers of known demands are supplied by one or several depots. The objective is to find a set of delivery and pick-up routes satisfying some requirements or constraints and giving minimal total cost. It is important for companies that plan routes and schedule fleet on a regular basis to ensure that the routes are up-to-date, economical and efficient.

Goods, passengers, mail posts are some examples of the transported objects. The aim of the solution of a VRP is usually to find the minimum cost or distance by serving maximum number of customer requests (or orders) subject to some constraints. Those constraints are important to implement effectively to VRP and it is useful to list all restrictions that can potentially apply.

Vehicles are the key element of vehicle routing problem. Each vehicle has a limit (capacity - usually weight and/or volume) on the goods or passengers carried. Each vehicle has a total working time from departure to arrival back at the depot and each vehicle has a time period within which it must leave the depot. Moreover, each vehicle has a number of time periods that must be taken into consideration for vehicle routing problem.

Another key element of the vehicle routing problem is orders. Order can be defined as your goods, passengers have a certain quantity which has to be delivered (and/or collected), and to be picked up. Orders also can be services to provide to customer at some locations, such as the customer location.

After taking those constraints into consideration, it is an important aim to meet the above requirements. There are a number of objectives that could be adopted. To solve vehicle routing problem effectively, it is important to minimize the number of vehicles used. It might minimize the total distance and time.  

In this way, users can reach their goal that they can make a profit while saving their time and maximizing customer satisfaction.

Vehicle route planning and scheduling is a hard and time consuming task. Most companies even do not plan routes or schedules. This makes their operations costly and inefficient. We have produced logvrp, a web based SaaS application that does vehicle route planning and scheduling. It helps users to manage their operational, transportation activities, field workforce optimization. Our goal is to give the best solution to users’ vehicle routing problem and provide effective route planning and scheduling solutions all around the world. You can check it at: http://logvrp.com

logvrp - The Route Planner

logvrp is a web and GIS based vehicle route planner software that is a trademark of the company NetAkıl . logvrp helps organizations, companies to profit on logistics activities, minimize transportation costs and save on gas. It is used for finding optimum fleet routes, route optimization, fleet route planning, delivery route planning, pickup route planning and fleet management. logvrp helps users to manage routes and to plan orders, stations and fleet effectively. Users can find optimum routes for a set of locations, delivery/pick up and fleet. It is certain that logvrp reduces distances between 15%-20% on average over planning by hand.  Planning a route is easy and fast using logvrp.

logvrp is suitable for any organization serving customers with products, goods or services with a fleet. logvrp offers  to optimize your routes and schedule your tasks while maintaining a high level of customer service. logvrp will help users by  increasing productivity and keeping them organized and efficient.

The software has unique features for both commercial and academic users. It has a web based user interface containing Google Map by which specifying real geographic locations of vehicles, depots, delivery/pickup stations on the map. More excitingly, the logvrp provides more than 1 alternative route plan. This feature does not exist in other route planner applications.

Even as a superior feature, logvrp provides tools for the users to compare their own created route plans with that of logvrp’s route plans. In this way, users can measure how much profit they can get using logvrp. This is enhanced by statistical gain reports over time so that users can see their profit and performance over a period of time.

More excitingly, the users have the opportunity to embed their VRP solver algorithms through the provided API as a plug-in, as well as using built-in algorithms of some types of VRPs. This means that the number of alternative route plans will increase over time. As a result, logvrp users are not stuck into only 1 route plan, unlike other route planners.

logvrp is flexible to cover almost any type of business need for fleet task planning, scheduling and route optimization. logvrp has a very generic routing and optimization model which covers lots of real life constraints and parameters. This makes logvrp, an ideal route planning & fleet scheduling application/service. Other route planner applications/services resemble a toy when compared to logvrp. Since they can only model deliveries or just stops to visit, this makes them too deficient to cover real life business needs/ expectations.

logvrp is designed as a user friendly web application based on Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and built on top of cloud computing. This makes the application scalable and reliable. Moreover web service API is provided for the users who want to integrate their IT system with logvrp, such as a vehicle tracking, order management system or ERP, etc. A unified object oriented model has been designed to cover all types of the vehicle route planning & scheduling needs. 

logvrp was an eye poener for users who needed a route planner application. Other route planners were only planning stops to visit for destinations. They did not include vehicle and order parameters. They were planning routes simply that cover only route directions between two or more geographical locations. When logvrp was launched, other route planners realized their missing aspects on route planning & scheduling and then they developed their applications. Therefore, logvrp has given direction to similar route planners to progress themselves.