New Profit-based Navigation is Increasing Fleets' Margins

Would you rather have a driver spend $15 for a toll route, or 15 minutes stuck in traffic?

It's not a trick question — but it’s one you can’t answer without knowing more. 

Is your driver going to miss his delivery window sitting in traffic “on route?” Will the delay cascade into further missed deliveries? Will the “out of route” mileage, toll cost, or additional fuel consumption kill your profit margin? 

Typical navigation and trip planning systems cannot answer these questions. They simply pick the most efficient route based on arbitrary rulesets. Once a route is determined, it becomes the expectation for the remainder of the trip, regardless of what happens on the road in the meantime.

Modern “dynamic routing,” which adjusts the route in response to changes on the road, has not caught on in the trucking industry. Fleets have been reluctant to try it, largely because of the long-standing position that once the mileage has been defined, that’s the mileage. There’s also a belief that fleets will lose control and be unable to understand the impact of on-the-fly changes.

And they’re right. Dynamic routing alone simply cannot know whether taking a load one way rather than another will cut into your margins—or increase them. It has the potential to kill a load’s profits with a single course correction.

Until now.

As part of our industry-leading driver workflow platform, Eleos has developed a new profit-based dynamic routing solution. With this new patent-pending solution, you can know exactly when a driver is dynamically rerouted or when a driver makes changes to the original trip plan, and what the impact will be.

Eleos’s truck-legal navigation provides drivers en route to new locations with turn-by-turn driving directions. It also provides drivers who run the same lanes repeatedly with situational awareness of unexpected traffic, construction, wrecks, or weather. Regardless of the driver’s familiarity with the route, they can be intelligently re-routed if something happens up ahead.

What makes Eleos’s routing solution exceptional is the ability to predefine trip policies, such as maximum toll costs and mileage. The dynamic routing engine evaluates a new route against your predefined policies. If the new route causes those limits to be exceeded, both your driver and you will know about it instantly, giving you an opportunity to make adjustments while the trip is still active.

Eleos also helps fleets to understand and manage off-route miles that aren’t prescribed by the routing engine. Without this, many fleets aren't even aware of an out-of-route deviation until it’s too late. Eleos helps fleets recognize driver intent before a driver has the chance to affect the profitability of the route. With trip policies, if your driver unexpectedly adds a stop along his route, the system will reevaluate the new route against your trip policies. You and the driver will immediately know how that change impacts that load. Driver workflow also allows drivers to respond directly to policy violations, letting Dispatch know where, how, and why they’re deviating from the original trip plan.

This means you can set up routing guidelines based on the actual profit constraints of your business, and immediately react when your profit margins are in jeopardy.

By combining an advanced truck-safe dynamic routing engine with trip policies, Eleos gives carriers the confidence and control they need to move to a dynamic routing solution.

Learn more about how Eleos’s driver workflow platform increases fleet productivity and efficiency at eleostech.com.

Eleos is the leading driver workflow platform for trucking companies. Eleos simplifies drivers’ lives by putting everything they need in one unified driver app. Eleos offers an extensive collection of powerful pre-built components that allow for full customization of the app to match every evolving business need. Craft a custom mobile app for your fleet drivers that give you the control you want and the flexibility you need. Eleos powers driver apps for many of the industry's foremost fleets such as Knight-Swift, Ryder, USA Truck, Prime Inc, USXpress,  and many others. Learn more at eleostech.com.

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