vWork, New Zealand‘s leading cloud platform for mobile workforces, has announced the release of Advanced Route Optimisation to help fleets cope with Auckland‘s painful traffic problems. 

Director and majority shareholder Sam Morgan says it is a game changer for fleets looking to combat Auckland‘s out of control congestion, which destroys business margins and strains the mental health of professional drivers.

“Advanced Route Optimisation allows dispatchers to enter all the work they need to do that day – pick-ups, deliveries, and service calls – and then our algorithms will define the most efficient set of run-sheets for their drivers,” says vWork CEO Brendon Petrich. 

“Our analysis shows that fleets being scheduled manually spend 20% more time on the road than they need to, simply because the complexity of scheduling thousands of jobs across hundreds of vehicles is beyond any human.” 
 
The platform takes into account a driver‘s working hours, skills and vehicle capabilities and then computes thousands of possible routes to accomplish the most work in the least possible time. Operators can choose to reduce total time on road or to do more work with their existing resources without having to put more vehicles on the road. 

“While we‘ve built the optimisation platform to be useful to any transport operator, it‘s particularly useful for companies using a hub and spoke approach like courier firms, or those with lots of stops on a single daily run such as is typical for delivery, install, service and maintenance operators,” says Petrich.

Morgan says vWork‘s goal is to bring the advanced technology available to the big players like Uber, Amazon, and FedEx to smaller operators who could never afford to build this sort of technology themselves. 

“And if we can get more vans and trucks off the road in Auckland during the day too, then that would be great,” says Morgan.