MapAnything Decision Support Scientists Shape a New Era of Routing Optimization
We’re proud to introduce The Optimizers, a new team at MapAnything comprised of some of the world’s preeminent experts in decision support science. The new decision science team, led by Chris Groer, a renowned expert in applied mathematics and operations research, will take routing algorithms to the next level.
Decision support is crucial to be able to do scheduling and routing well, and we are bringing in the best and brightest to ensure our customers have the most advanced routing algorithm in the industry. Why? Because routing can make or break company’s sales, service and fleet strategies, ruining their brand reputation and revenues. Routing optimization uses analytics to help organizations identify the best possible route according to their objectives. Routing done poorly is a massive cost:
- Sales suffer: All field sales reps are concerned about wasting time driving or caught in traffic, for some, the problem is acute. Of respondents in a recent MapAnything survey 23% spend between 50%-75% of their time driving. Worse, 11% are spending between 75%-90% of their time driving. Driving is among the worst productivity killers — yet one of the things that can addressed with world-class routing software.
- Services suffer: Poor route planning can ruin customer experiences. Customers want on-demand service, in our on-demand world. No matter how good your product or service is, getting it to the customer on time, when a customer needs it, ensures longer, more profitable relationships. Late deliveries ruin those relationships. A poll of over 500 B2B customers shows that 55% of customers would stop using a company’s products after two or three late deliveries
- Fleet costs skyrocket: Idling costs fleet owners between $5,000-$12,000 per vehicle per year in fuel, in addition to adding unnecessary engine hours which cause wear and tear, and have a negative impact on the environment. Properly routing vehicles dramatically reduces fuel costs associated with operating fleets.
Fortunately, MapAnything has always invested heavily in its routing calculations to ensure customers have access to the most advanced routing capabilities.The concept of routing vehicles — getting people to where they want to go, when they want to go — sounds simple enough. But in reality, it’s an incredibly complex issue, and difficult to solve. To solve them properly, Chris and his team analyze multiple facets.
- Real-time: Many routing solutions approach the problem by analyzing real time calculations — for instance, how fast is traffic moving in a particular place in the current moment. This dimension is important, and is taken into account by MapAnything, but MapAnything goes many steps further than competitors, layering real-time data with logic, including but not limited to other critical variables, like average traffic patterns, weather, competing objectives.
- Multi-factor calculations: Effective route planning must not only be able to calculate the average time between A and B, it must consider multiple factors. For instance, route planning that revolves around a fixed meeting time, on a fixed day, with other constraints. Say that you need to arrive at a meeting at 10:00 am sharp, and another meeting across town at noon. The routing system must consider typical travel time for the route, factor in delays for the specific day and time you’re traveling, and factor where you’re coming from for the first meeting, and where you need to go to get to the next next meeting. Now imagine that this schedule isn’t for today, it’s for next Friday. Real time routing won’t work in that case. You need a system that can handle multiple factors, and calculate averages. That is where the complexity comes in.
- Weather: Routes should change to account for current and future weather delays.
- Competing objectives: Every trip a field sales or service rep makes includes tradeoffs. You can easily reduce costs through reducing travel, but that means you see fewer customers and prospects. Is it better to attend three meetings in the same vicinity, or skip those in favor of driving across town for one important meeting? Routing and scheduling algorithms need to consider other data sources like data from CRM or immovable schedules to identify which tradeoffs are best for achieving objectives.
Only MapAnything, with the input from its world-class Optimizers team, provides such advanced, proprietary algorithms, purpose built for real-world field sales and service optimization. Watch this blog in coming weeks to learn more about each of the team’s decision scientists, read summaries of some of their most compelling academic papers on vehicle routing, and get a glimpse into how the team will radically change the way sales, service and fleet managers plan their travel for business gain.
