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Fitting the Pieces Together: A Guide to Office Operations for the Liquid Waste, Portable Toilet & Septic Pumping Industries |
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Routing is the order that the work is to be completed. Typically, the trick is to set the order so the travel time between jobs is kept to a minimum and all the players are at the job at the same time. With "regular" service, for example, trash pickup routes, the plan is to select customers in a tight area or who are along a major highways to keep travel time lower. For demand routing, like septic or sewer and drain where a significant number of jobs are called for immediate or next day service, the idea is to have a good handle on where you have already committed your drivers so that you can minimize travel time by dispatching the job to the driver who will be closest, minimizing the driver’s travel time.
Some of the tools used to help in establishing and maintaining routes are:
Good Memory
Written list or pocket notebook
Route books
Spread sheets
Mapping software
Industry specific routing software
First, let’s look at routing and some of the specific information, skills, goals and people who manage routing efforts in a company.
This skill requires a detailed understanding of the local roads and good understanding of the trade-off between taking local roads and longer, but faster highways. This is usually the knowledge that limits who in a company can do the routing. In any company there are three people/positions who can route a customer.
Order taker
Operations manager
Driver
The order takers are the least expensive per hour and have the most information to route a customer. They usually have the customer on the phone to obtain directions and have the time to record the directions and any special instructions for the specific job.
The second person, is the operations manager, he/she usually has the most information about the existing routes combined with knowledge of local roads, making him/her an excellent person to route customers. Operations managers are usually more expensive and are in very high demand for dealing with day to day problems and routing business issues.
The third person is the driver. This individual knows the most about road conditions and the best way to get from here to there. Unfortunately, this is usually the most expensive person per hour to route a customer and usually, unless the driver is the owner, not interested in changing his route 10-20% on a regular basis to keep all the routes optimized.
A route is a grouping of work to be completed in a specified time period. It is usually done by the same person and is designed to maximize the number of revenue generating services within the time period, an eight to ten hour day. The layout of a route differs depending upon type of work and local road conditions. Some typical types are:
This technique is the assign work in a tight geographic area so that the driver and truck spend as little time as possible traveling between jobs. Usually, the truck goes directly to the service area via a high-speed road, and after completing services returns the same way.
This method is to have a driver travel along a high-speed road and complete services along the road. Usually the route goes out on one road and back along a different road forming a loop that starts and ends at the shop.
This is a combination of using high speed routes to reach a concentration of stops and the driver leaving the highway to service many stops on the local roads and then return to the highway at the same exit or the next entrance on the highway in the direction of the route.
This is a very important issue. In previous columns we have shown that up to 60% of the expenses of your company are directly related to routing. A 10% improvement in routing can drive 6% to the bottom line of your company. Here’s an example. A company automated their portable toilet service route books. Prior to the automation, the company used route books managed by the route drivers. Once the routes were placed into the routing package, it became obvious that several of the routes had very low unit counts. One in particular had 10 units and was being completed in a 10 hour work day, including two hours of overtime. When asked why, the driver responded, "I stayed out of the office because I knew it was the slow season."
The message is that it is always best to have more then one person look at routing and it is not always the best idea to leave this work to the driver. In this case, the driver thought he was doing the right thing. He was paid for 10 hours during the business season for servicing 45 units and questioned why his pay should change because the route unit count has dropped.to 10.
As you can see, the routing of work requires the efforts of multiple people and represents a significant portion of your company’s expenses. The investment of time and money into tools to improve the efficiency of routing can have significant financial impact on your company’s bottom line. Some of the leading new tools available today that are generally available are:
Mapping software The Thomas Guide or Delorme Street Atlas are both excellent packages that can supply directions and printed maps. These are both CD based systems and require Pentium class computers with fast printers. The plus side is that anyone can find out about local road conditions. The down sides are the equipment requirements and that these programs are as not up to date for all areas of the country equally.
Spread sheets or Word Processors an be used to maintain an electronic copy of routes so that they can be easily changed and printed for the service drivers. These are both significant improvements over the shirt pocket list especially when a route has to be covered by a new driver. The plus side is the clarity of route lists and relative ease to move stops between routes. The down side is that information needs to be entered twice: once in the routing system and then again in the invoicing and customer management system.
Industry specific routing software maintains customer information, routes and works with mapping software to eliminate duplicate data entry. On the plus side, this is the most efficient use of company resources, minimizes data entry errors, and provides exposure to alternative ways of managing your business. On the down side, these software solutions require training and possibly require that you change your business operations to match how the software works.
In the next chapter, we will look at dispatching and related business issues and tools.