How to plan delivery routes without routing software

There is a widespread idea that route optimisation is something only software can solve. It is partly true, but it skips an important step: most delivery rounds that have never been organised carry 15 to 25 per cent of unnecessary distance that judgement alone will recover.

It is worth exhausting that before evaluating any system. First because it is free. Second, and more importantly, because it forces you to understand how your own round actually works, and without that no software is going to help you.

Start by measuring what you do today

You cannot improve what you have not measured. For one week, record three things per shift: odometer on departure, odometer on return, and the times you left and got back.

That already gives you the two figures that matter: kilometres per delivery and minutes per delivery. They become your baseline. Without them, any change you make afterwards is just a feeling.

Group by area, not by order received

The most expensive and most common mistake is delivering in the order the orders came in. It is the natural thing to do when you are working off a WhatsApp list: you go from top to bottom. The result is a route that crosses the city several times.

Grouping by area means splitting your coverage into blocks and finishing one block before moving to the next. Nothing sophisticated is required: neighbourhoods, or simply quadrants drawn on a map.

This single change usually delivers the biggest return on the whole list.

Order each area by time window

Within a block, not all stops are equal. Some customers only accept deliveries at certain hours, some shops close at midday, some addresses have nobody home until the afternoon.

Order the stops in each area around those constraints first, and only then by proximity. Do it the other way round and you get a geometrically perfect route that fails on half the drops.

Cut out the zigzag

Within an area, the practical rule is to travel in one direction and not double back. Go up one avenue serving everything on one side, and come down the parallel street serving the other.

It sounds obvious written down, but it is the first thing to break when a last-minute order comes in and gets slotted into the middle of the route because it looks close. It is close in a straight line, not in driving distance.

Use Google Maps as far as it goes

Google Maps lets you build a route with several stops and reorder them by hand, which is useful for comparing two possible orderings and seeing which gives fewer kilometres. It is a reasonable tool for a small round.

The limit is ten stops including start and end. Up to there it works fine. Beyond that you have to split the route into segments and chain them, and you lose the overall view.

Leave room for what comes in late

No route survives the day intact. There is always an urgent order or a drop that falls through. A round that goes out at 100 per cent of capacity has no slack to absorb that.

What works best in practice is reserving the last portion of the route for whatever gets slotted in along the way, rather than inserting each urgent job into the middle of a route that was already built.

Where this stops being enough

The manual method has a fairly identifiable ceiling. You start hitting it when any of these happen:

• More than 20 or 25 stops per driver. Ordering that by hand stops being reasonable and starts eating the time you were trying to save.
• More than one vehicle. At that point it is not ordering a route, it is splitting stops across routes, which is a considerably harder problem.
• Time windows on most stops. When nearly every drop has a constraint, manual ordering becomes trial and error.
• The route is always built by the same person from memory. That works right up until the day that person is off.

What a system changes

A routing system does in seconds what takes half an hour by hand, and above all it rebuilds the route when something changes. That is the real difference: not building the route, but being able to rebuild it at eleven in the morning when six new orders have come in and two have fallen through.

But if you have never organised the round by hand, a system will optimise your disorder. First understand how your deliveries actually move, measure what you do today, and take the gains that judgement gives you. Then, when the volume justifies it, the tool multiplies something that already works.