The Butterfly Effect: How your sales fleet impacts smart cities of the future
Logistics Viewpoints recently posted an insightful blog, Leveraging Traffic Data for Smart Transportation, that looks at how the rise of urbanization and congestion makes smart transportation strategies crucial for city planning. The post approaches the topic from the perspective of smart cities, explaining that
“Urbanization raises a complex set of challenges from moving people around large and congested cities to making sure freight arrives on time. Cities should optimize traffic management and parking systems, improve mobility-as-a-service, and supervise infrastructure and existing asset management.” I apply that same concept of optimization for the smart transportation problem, but instead of cities, I apply it to field sales and service fleets that must navigate the streets day and night. The two disciplines are intertwined and one impacts the other.
Congestion and inefficient transportation have direct and acute impacts on businesses that rely on their fleets to support customer needs and fuel business growth. Efficient routing and scheduling is crucial to optimizing travel patterns, and though there are several companies out there that offer analytics-based routing software to help companies improve travel efficiencies, many of them are only addressing a small sliver of the larger complexities at hand, and they stumble when they analyze traffic.
No matter how powerful your route optimization algorithms are, if you are not using accurate travel times based on the actual street network and predicted traffic, your routing and scheduling will be sub-par. Routing engines should not only leverage cutting edge mathematical optimization, but they should also be able to provide the most accurate travel time estimates as inputs. Only then can routes be truly optimized, and have the ability to impact the amount of time vehicles are on the road. More to come on this issue in coming weeks, but suffice it to say, these estimates play a starring role in optimization routes properly.
As Misal writes in the logistics blog, “Adopting a data-driven approach, leveraging analytics, machine learning, and digitization will sustain smart transportation. Agile and resourceful smart transportation can lay the foundation for long-term smart cities success, and it will also build a culture of data-driven decision making to manage ever-changing traffic landscape.” I agree with those principles and I’m excited to see how our team here at MapAnything will apply those same principals to the throng of sales and service vehicles out there. Because though our primary goal of route optimization is to help businesses improve their bottom lines and improve customer satisfaction, there’s no doubt there is a butterfly effect that will ultimately impact traffic congestion across the country, working hand in hand with the people who will optimize traffic patterns for smart cities today and in the future.
