Route Tracking: How to Achieve 100% Operational Visibility

In this post, we’ll show you EXACTLY how to use route tracking to get total operational visibility.

Live and over time.

In fact, this is the same process our clients use to track deliveries (pick-ups + drop-offs):

Route and driver performance:

And let customers track their orders:

So if you want to achieve 100% visibility over your last mile, you’ll love this new guide.

Let’s dive in.

What Is Route Tracking?

Route tracking is the process of monitoring driver activities on a planned route and analyzing performance as drivers complete their route. Common things professionals monitor with route tracking include driver location, route use, task completion, route time and distance, vehicle idle time, and more.

In other words:

Route tracking helps you to know where your drivers are on the route that you have planned for them and how well they are following and completing your instructions.

Why Is Route Tracking Important?

The main reason to track routes is that it helps your drivers perform better.

That’s because you KNOW what your drivers are doing and how well they are following their planned route… while they’re driving.

With that, here are a handful of other benefits of tracking routes:

Improved Last-Mile Visibility

Let’s face it:

It’s difficult to know what your drivers are doing once they set off on their route.

So the best way to find out is to see what’s happening in the last mile of your delivery.

And there’s two ways you can go about this:

Your dispatchers can call up drivers to get a report on their location and completed tasks.

(Which can take a lot of time and is frustrating for both drivers and dispatchers.)

Or you can use route tracking software… and see where each one of your drivers are and what they are doing live:

That way, dispatchers can contact only the drivers that aren’t following their routes. And figure out why.

Continuous Operational Efficiency

If something isn’t going to plan, you can use the route optimization software to make changes to the route in real time:

Or, for example, schedule a few of their deliveries with a different driver:

Ideally you’d use all available resources to keep your last-mile delivery running smoothly. Even when problems occur, and the route you initially planned isn’t working out.

And since you’re using software, you’re collecting all of that data:

Which means you can analyze it historically:

And make changes to your delivery process to improve your operations.

So that you achieve 100% operational efficiency. Continuously.

Better Driver Management

We’ve already touched upon this:

With route tracking apps, it’s easier to know what your drivers are doing and where they are.

Which makes it easier to manage them while they’re on the road:

It also means drivers don’t have to report back to the office while they’re driving.

Instead, dispatchers can contact drivers only in case of a problem.

For example, if the driver’s ETA doesn’t match a delivery window, the dispatcher can take action to ensure on-time delivery:

Better Delivery Service

Route tracking also promotes a practice of drivers calling dispatchers first.

Besides improving internal communication, it also removes the need for manual reporting.

Drivers can focus all of their efforts on providing a better service to customers.

While office staff have more time to anticipate problems and solve them.

For example, if a driver encounters traffic, route planners can use the software to adjust the route based on heavier traffic:

And since you already have route tracking capabilities, it gives you the opportunity to send tracking links to customers:

Which allows you to provide an amazing delivery experience to your customers.

Lower Delivery Costs

Route tracking saves you time. And…

Time = money.

In fact, route optimization software can save you as much as $1,126.67 per vehicle per month:

And there’s a lot you can do to lower delivery costs even more.

For example, eLogii enables you to track driver overtime on the route:

So you can use it to reduce the amount of money you spend covering more expensive hourly rates.

You can also track route distance and duration, which you can use to reduce fuel consumption:

Or vehicle utilization:

Which enables you to optimize the payload capacity of each vehicle in your fleet.

There’s a lot.

So it may be worth to:

How to Track Routes With eLogii

We have developed eLogii as an end-to-end suite for logistics operations. And that means it also acts as a route-tracking app that monitors and controls driver activities along the routes.

So here is some insight into how order tracking works with eLogii.

Tracking Page

Customizing the customer’s tracking page with eLogii allows for greater visibility.

Here are some of the options the tracking page offers:

• ETA - Customize how the ETA is shown to the customer.
• Task reschedule and time window edit - Customers can reschedule the delivery and edit their order.
• Address and contact detail update - Customers can edit the address, and add additional instructions.
• Default tracking locale - Your customer can select the language in which the tracking link will be displayed. If they don’t, the default language will be the same one as the language selected for the dashboard.

In the Tracking Page, there are three additional helpful options for customizing orders:

• Displayed Task Information - You can choose bonus parameters to be visible to customers, such as Task UID (Unique ID), Task Items, Rating, and Task History.
• Status Labels - These fields let you expand on the order status. For instance, instead of “Pickup Arrived” the customer can get the message “The driver is picking up your order”.
• Styling - The tracking link can be further tailored for the customer. You can change the map theme or the color of some parameters.

After customizing the dashboard, it is easier to view the live ETA updates.

View Live ETA Updates

The eLogii live route tracking feature allows for updates to be sent to the dashboard in real-time.

For instance, in case of a traffic jam, the ETA will automatically update to a later time.

To check the status of a specific driver, select the assigned driver shown on the right side of the screen. The screen will zoom onto their route, showing the current location and the planned stops.

To further check the details of the planned stops, hover over each stop to see the Task name, current location, time window, and ETA.

Some stops have multiple pickups/deliveries, and you will see that information as well:

The left side of the screen shows you all the tasks, and their live states. You can view singular tasks or all of them. Further, you can filter to see tasks of specific categories (such as Late tasks).

Review Analytics

To achieve 100% visibility over operations, use the analytics feature on the eLogii dashboard. It’s easily understood and visually digestible, thanks to the charts and numerical values shown.

The two kinds of analytics you can gain insight into are:

• Real-time analytics
• Historical data analytics

Real-Time Analytics

Real-time data refers to information of the current day. As the name says, it is updated live as your fleet completes tasks.

Here are some of the crucial metrics to pay attention to to achieve efficient driver tracking:

• Success - This metric shows the number of tasks completed.
• Execution - This shows you the number of tasks based on their status. The execution breakdown table underneath shows you a detailed view of the number of tasks categorized by their status. The task status categories are:
  • Pending
  • In Progress
  • Completed
  • Failed
• Planning - This gets you insight into assigned and unassigned tasks.

Since the data is initially displayed in the donut pie chart, you need to hover over the chart to see the precise number of tasks based on their status.

Some other key route metrics on the analytics dashboard are:

• Route count - Number of routes for that day.
• Capacity utilization - Median value of vehicle capacity for the day.
• Schedule utilization - Median value of schedule utilization for the day.
• Actionable items - Shows items that may have gone over the prearranged capacity and schedule plan.
• Route distance and duration - The total and median route distance and duration for that day.

When it comes to main driver metrics in the analytics dashboard, they are:

• Status chart - A visual and numerical view of active, inactive, and unavailable drivers for that day.
• Overtime - Average, median, and total numerical value of your fleet drivers’ overtime.
• Vehicle type - Shows the vehicle types used on the current day.

And finally, data accuracy on the dashboard is useful for finding out the number and percentage of late tasks. The travel time part of the dashboard shows you the duration of the routes in average and median data.

Historical Data Analytics

For an easily-digestible analysis of past data, use the information shown in the historical data analytics. The information in the historical data part of the dashboard is added after route data gets processed at the end of the day.

You can filter the data by:

• Time frame
• Team, driver, and customer
• And many more.

You may also group the data by date, weekday, week, month, or driver.

Use the filters to view and compare the data shown in these different tabs:

• Tasks - Displays tasks based on status. It comes in handy when comparing your fleet’s or a particular driver’s performance on a task level.
• Failed reasons - Shows you the reasons for failed tasks.
• Partially completed - Displays partially completed tasks. As with the other segments, you can filter the data per your needs.
• On-time vs. Late - This shows the ratio between tasks completed on time and late. It also lets you compare and contrast them.
• Lateness - It shows you just how much was your fleet late on some routes. You can filter the data here as well. For instance, you may wish to view just the tasks where the lateness exceeded 30 minutes.
• Service durations - This displays the amount of time your drivers spend at their location. It’s possible here as well to filter the data by the length of time.
• Route durations - As the name says itself, here you can see all the historical route durations.
• Route distances - You can view the historical route distances and filter them to compare them.
• Vehicle utilization - See how much have you successfully utilized your vehicles over time.

Bear in mind that you can export the data to your computer for an offline view of your state of affairs.

Why eLogii Is the Best Tool for Achieving 100% Visibility Over Operations

eLogii has a track record of providing customers with higher performance and better efficiency.

The software saves time for the entire team - from the dispatchers to the drivers and provides customers with better visibility.

As deliveries are a huge part of business strategies, the price you pay for using eLogii is low compared to the ROI it gives you.

And since we believe in total transparency, we are offering you a chance to see how eLogii compares to other automated last-mile delivery solutions.

Speaking of things we offer…