It did not earn the trust of the route optimisation software Australia just in one night. It provided it with a traffic jam. Every person that ever saw a delivery schedule seat-belching before breakfast has suffered the anguish. Away along roads here and there, And here and there, with no warning. One minute you’re flying. The next minute you are caught behind a bin lorry who has a lifetime to live. The advent of the software was that the humans were ailing and tired of toiling their day at random and in the lore of land.
On memory several years had been dedicated. “Turn left at the old servo.” After lunch, do not go to that street. It worked until it didn’t. Momentarily school zones are on and off. No ill jest is like an accident. Time slots are shamelessly changed by customers. These curve balls can be processed through the use of route optimisation software rather faster than whiteboard could process them. Routes shift mid-run. Stops reshuffle. The drivers are not required to make a call to dispatch after every five minutes. The plan is not dead but develops into a collection of scribbled out notes.
Australia adds flavour to you which you cannot find in other countries. Long regional runs where it is boredom that is the hazard. Suburban mazes, all streets were imitations on paste. Hot burns engines, and is forbearance. Smart routing systems put this stuff into consideration. They space breaks logically. They put into consideration the weight of vehicles in rough roads. Others even learn to adopt other practices that are not discussed by the drivers. When there was no longer a correlation between the heavy loads and heat in the afternoon, one of the Darwin fleets started to observe the shortening of days. And nobody disagreed with the result. They just finished earlier.
The voice of money is the most outspoken in the room. Software route optimisation has its way with wasted routes. The reduction in the quantity of kilometres covered means that the fuel tanks will last longer. Tyres cut screams to music. Schedules of maintenance loosen. A mid-sized distributor in Sydney has remembered one of the stories. In three months with new software, overtime was virtually eradicated. Same delivery volume. Same crew. Less chaos. The spreadsheet was not lying, but the boss would have wished that he had amended the spreadsheet earlier.
Drivers feel the shift first. They are no longer like punishment in their days. Routes make sense. Rest where dead bodies await him. Stress drops a gear. One of the drivers laughed back, and responded that he did not fight with his GPS anymore because it owed him money. Customers feel it too. The appropriate times of arrival are replaced by imprecise promises. Phones ring less. Trust rebuilds quietly. The route optimisation software is no longer a glamour feature in a country where distance is a constituent of day-to-day business and has it starts to act like common sense in steel capped boots.