Latest News | Trimble MAPS

Reliable, Integrated Navigation - Down to the Hour

Written by ALK Technologies | 3 March, 2016

For Postal, Parcel and Courier Services, first time delivery success and high customer satisfaction are key.  With highly accurate navigation and powerful advanced route optimization technology, companies can provide their customers with advance notice of delivery right down to the hour – a highly competitive edge in today’s market.

In the next post of our Industry Spotlight series, learn how ALK has built a reputation for providing solutions that take routing efficiency to the next level to meet the specific needs of Postal, Parcel and Courier fleets.

Establishing Superior Customer Service with Customer Convenient Time Windows

Building optimized routes is crucial to generating precise delivery time windows. The process begins when a driver generates a manifest of deliveries on their hand held. ALK’s CoPilot Professional integrated navigation solution then takes the manifest and factors in pre-agreed time windows, driver wait times and rest periods to optimize the stops to find the most efficient route.  In addition to removing the need to manually plan a driving itinerary, it also provides the driver the opportunity to see if a particular delivery will be a challenge to deliver in the specified time window.

The final optimized route with defined ETAs for each stop is then passed to the back office for review and fine-tuning as needed.  With this knowledge, companies can confidently communicate precise 1 hour time windows to customers as well as offer the option to reschedule if the timing is inconvenient. With back office monitoring of a driver’s location in real-time, the option to notify a customer of delivery delays is also available.

Improve Driver Productivity with Post-Trip Route Visualization

The ability to visualize your entire fleet’s activity post-trip provides an additional advantage to back office planning and driver productivity. ALK Maps’s route visualization platform is built from the same source of commercial mapping and data as CoPilot Professional and provides the ability to interactively modify routes, view ETAs and even overlay weather and traffic information directly on the map.  You can visualize your entire fleet or drill down to a vehicle/driver level for detailed reporting of missed SLAs and planned versus actual routes to assist with driver coaching.

You can learn more about our Postal, Parcel and Courier solutions at copilotpro.com