How OptimoRoute Makes Life Easier for a Food Distributor’s Dispatchers ( Image Source)
With the help of a transportation management system (TMS) like OptimoRoute to handle the dispatching and routing, you’ll have the time and energy to treat your drivers as people. But it’s not always easy to remember this when multi-tasking and dispatching hundreds of loads every single day.
This isn’t just key for suppliers, retailers, or LTL trucking companies, empathy and communication is key to good driver relationships in all industries. That way, you can set clear expectations and won’t be hounded constantly by impatient or unsatisfied customers, giving your drivers space to perform their job. He also highlights that clear communication to the customers (from the sales staff) about the industry regulations is essential (and that’s why it’s also important to know all of your transportation terms). – Tim Dreyer, Transportation Dispatcher, Patene Building Supplies It’s about keeping the product moving, and if you the drivers are happy the drivers are moving.” “Nowadays it’s not about trying to move as fast as possible, it’s about keeping the drivers happy. In an interview with the Lead Pedal Podcast for Truck Drivers, Tim Dreyer, the Rick Austin Memorial 2019 dispatcher of the year, shares his secrets to success. The Key to Being a Successful Transportation Dispatcher Tim Dreyer shares his secrets to success. With real-time locations and real-time rerouting, OptimoRoute makes your life a lot easier. Handling cancellations and last minute changesĪs a dispatcher in the food transportation industry, you must always be ready to handle cancellations and last-minute order changes. OptimoRoute uses this to track driver performance, giving you easy access to information like top performers and underutilized drivers. OptimoRoute’s mobile app tracks the drivers through GPS tracking and geofencing, giving you and your team a real-time view of where your fleet is at all times. Track and monitor drivers to improve efficiencyĪ transportation dispatcher must also track the locations and performance of their drivers and vehicles. With OptimoRoute’s workload balancing feature, you can also cut overtime by better sharing loads between drivers, and keep a perfect compliance record.
With OptimoRoute, you can set possible break windows at the driver level, and OptimoRoute will automatically plan breaks for any given daily schedule. Managing workloads and planning breaks - so drivers can stay compliant and you can avoid potential issues with the FMCSA - is also the responsibility of the transport dispatcher. Balance workloads and plan breaks for driver compliance (and to reduce turnover) OptimoRoute automatically finds the most efficient routes, accounting for delivery time windows, loading times, and other real-world restrictions.
But with OptimoRoute, you can import orders in bulk, and let the route optimization software handle the rest. To make sure the drivers can handle as many loads as possible per day, a dispatcher plans efficient routes in advance for the whole fleet.ĭoing this manually as a single person would be impossible. Plan efficient routes to save gas and time OptimoRoute can help you with vehicle maximization through automated planning that accounts for drivers’ schedules and vehicle capacities. Distribute loads efficiently across fleetĪs a transportation dispatcher, you must plan and efficiently distribute loads and orders across XYZ’s fleet of trucks and drivers. Let’s break down the primary responsibilities of a transportation dispatcher in more detail… #1. Transportation dispatchers manage tasks like assigning loads to drivers and vehicles, planning routes, scheduling drivers, and tracking driver performance. What Does a Transportation Dispatcher Do?Ī transportation dispatcher is responsible for coordinating daily deliveries and communicating with drivers to ensure deliveries are completed on time and following all regulations.
With hundreds of vehicles and truck drivers and a constant stream of deliveries and pickups to handle, manual dispatching is impossible. Even with a small fleet, a few drivers, and 20 daily deliveries, dispatching and routing can still take hours. Transportation dispatching is a complex role with a lot of moving parts.