Frequently Asked Questions
According to one estimate, Americans waste more than 65 billion dollars a year sitting in traffic. Say you want to go to your grocery store, your bank then the Target store. Did you know there are 6 different routes you can take? In fact, as the number of stops increases the numbers of possible routes go up exponentially. For 4 stops, there can be 24 routes and for 5 stops, there can be 120 different routes! The goal of TrackRoad.com is to cut your travel distance and travel time. Less distance traveled means less fuel burned, reduced gas emission in the air, reduced tear/wear on your vehicle, reduced probability of accident and reduced insurance cost--not to mention customer efficiency and going home early. The savings can be huge.
An efficient routing system is an indispensible tool for any route. Manually routing your fleet even on a small scale is out of the realm of human capacity and is best left to computers.
When there are multiple vehicles, route optimization is only one piece of the puzzle. The second piece is automatically dispatching the stops to the right vehicle. TrackRoad.com not only optimizes routes but before that it assigns them to the best matched vehicles.
Our built-in logic can tackle some of the most difficult tasks in vehicle routing from single depot (a warehouse) to geographically dispersed routing scenarios. Also, each vehicle has start location as well as an optional finish location so that all its stops can be fitted into the best possible route.
In short, TrackRoad.com examines your stops and vehicles, decides which is the best possible scenario, then assigns route to each vehicle based on several factors like quickest route, average speed of vehicle, load capacity, weight, max. stops, etc. Every route is optimized for minimized time. Pretty cool stuff!
Everything you need to get started is on our web site. There is no need to download any software and the trial is free.
If you visit more than 2 locations in any given day then you owe it to yourself to find the best route to go from start to finish in the most efficient and quickest manner. The task of figuring out the optimum route can get very dizzying as you add more and more stops. Simply making left turns, that is somehow supposed to give you the best route, is a myth and offers no scientific explanation. What is really needed is a computer and a state-of-the-art software that can run millions of computations to search for the best route. Enter TrackRoad.com.
How many addresses can I optimize in a route?
The rule of thumb is no more than 250 addresses per vehicle per day. Although we have some clients who regularly optimize 500+ stops, we recommend you keep it at less than 250 per vehicle per day. There is no limit on the number of vehicles in a given day.
In some cases it is physically impossible to visit all of the stops in a single day. The route is either too long or there are just too many stops that can be visited in a day. There is also a waiting time or visiting time factor at each stop. Fatigue and distance you can travel in one day are other variables. All of these factors can affect how you go about your route. Here's how TrackRoad can help you manage your route better.
TrackRoad can split your route into smaller chunks of routes of approximately same distance or equal number of stops (all of the smaller routes will also be optimized and ordered correctly). In the vehicle page, you can specify maximum number of hours you feel like driving each day---or maximum number of stops you can handle in a given day due to limit in capacity---see image to the left.
Vehicle's MaxMinutes per day is a must-have feature By using MaxMinutes field, you can create smaller and manageable optimized routes (6 to 8 hours each day) that you are able to visit comfortably each day and still arrive at your place of rest at a reasonable hour before starting your next round of stops the next day.
If you need to visit C at 8am, A at 10am, B at 2pm, and D & E stops any time, but not sure which is the best route, then you have come to the right place. TrackRoad can help manage time window routes.
In the vehicle, specify Time In. That is the time the vehicle is available and can start its route.
In the stop, speciy arrival time. If no arrival time is needed then leave Arrival Time blank. Our system will automatically try to fit in the no arrival time stops with arrival time stops whenever possible.
Each stop can also have a waiting time period. The waiting time at each stop in minutes can be specified in advance (enter manually or via Excel sheet column I). The waiting time will then be factored into the route's total time and will affect how the route will be planned.