Why route planning is a commercial execution issue, not a logistics one

Ask most FMCG distributors about route planning and the conversation goes straight to cost: how many kilometres can we cut, and how much fuel can we save?

It's a fair question, but a small one. Route planning decides how much of your fleet's capacity becomes delivered orders, how many of your driver hours become productive selling time, and how much of your operating window becomes revenue. Those are commercial outcomes, and they are set, or lost, on the route plan.

A vehicle isn't just a transport asset. It's a unit of distribution capacity, and what it produces depends on how well the whole delivery system around it is planned. The goal isn't fewer kilometres. It's more productive distribution from the fleet, drivers, orders and hours you already pay for.

The cost you can see and the cost you can't

A vehicle leaves the depot with a set of orders. Between the first drop and the last, it has to reconcile customer locations, delivery windows, traffic, load limits, road conditions and the time each drop actually takes. When those fall out of sync, the visible symptom is extra kilometres. The real damage is wider: more time between customers, fewer deliveries per day, overtime, longer operating hours, faster wear on vehicles, missed windows and a higher cost per delivery.

Fuel captures only a slice of that. The rest is capacity you paid for and never converted into delivered orders. It doesn't appear as a line item, which is exactly why it goes unchallenged.

The chain most operations never measure

Route planning sits at the head of a chain that runs straight through to commercial performance:

Route planning - fleet utilisation - driver productivity - delivery capacity - cost per delivery - commercial execution

Each link depends on the one before it. Get the plan right and every downstream number improves. Get it wrong and the losses compound quietly, as underused vehicles, stretched drivers, missed windows and a cost per order that creeps up with no obvious cause.

Most operations track the end of this chain (cost per delivery, on-time rates) without ever examining the input that drives it.

Why the shortest route is often the wrong one

Consider two routes. The figures are hypothetical and only illustrate the point.

Route A: 80 km, 8 deliveries, 9 hours.
Route B: 105 km, 14 deliveries, 8 hours.

On kilometres alone, Route A wins. Look at what each route produces, though. Route A spends 10 km and over an hour per delivery. Route B spends 7.5 km and about 34 minutes per delivery. Route B is longer in total, but it is shorter per delivery, faster per delivery, and finishes an hour earlier. Judge the routes by distance and you pick the one that delivers 43% fewer orders.

The point isn't that longer routes are better. Distance alone can't tell you how productive a route is. A dense, well-sequenced route beats a short, scattered one every time.

Optimising one variable in isolation usually creates a problem somewhere else. Cutting kilometres can stack too many drops onto one route, making it short on the map but slow to finish. Packing more deliveries onto each vehicle can lift utilisation while overloading the route and hurting service. Real route planning is a balancing act between order size and weight, vehicle capacity, delivery windows, customer priority, driver availability, traffic and existing commitments. The target is the best balance of cost, capacity and service, not the minimum on any one of them.

The metric hiding in plain sight: delivery capacity

• Take a fleet of 10 vehicles, each able to complete 15 deliveries within its operating window:
• 10 vehicles × 15 deliveries = 150 deliveries a day
• Now suppose poor sequencing and uneven order allocation mean each vehicle completes 11:
• 10 vehicles × 11 deliveries = 110 deliveries a day

That's 40 delivery opportunities gone in a single day, roughly 1,000 over a 26-day month. The fleet didn't shrink and nobody was laid off. The capacity just wasn't converted.

The cost impact is just as stark. A vehicle-day costs roughly the same whether it makes 11 drops or 15, because the driver, the vehicle and the depot overheads are all fixed. Using a purely illustrative cost of 100 units per vehicle-day, cost per delivery is 0.67 at 15 drops and 0.91 at 11. Spend hasn't moved, yet cost per delivery is about 36% higher.

Which raises the question every distributor should answer before approving another truck:

Have we established whether our existing fleet is being fully utilised?

Buying capacity is expensive. Recovering capacity you already own is far cheaper.

Why this belongs in the commercial conversation

Route planning is usually filed under logistics, but its effects land across the business:

• Sales serves fewer customers in the time available.
• Customer service deals with missed commitments and the complaints that follow.
• Finance watches cost per delivery rise with no matching change in spend.
• Operations carries idle fleet and driver capacity.
• Commercial management has less capacity to fulfil demand, which caps growth no matter how strong the pipeline is.

On high volumes and thin margins, a small inefficiency repeated across thousands of deliveries is a significant, permanent leak.

What to measure instead

If the aim is distribution productivity, kilometres are one metric among several, and rarely the most revealing:

• Cost per delivery: the truest view of distribution economics, far more telling than fuel spend.
• Deliveries per vehicle: how much capacity each vehicle generates in its operating window.
• Kilometres per delivery: exposes poor route density and bad sequencing.
• Vehicle utilisation: how well vehicles are used in both time and load capacity.
• Driver productivity: how much productive delivery activity happens within paid hours.
• On-time delivery: the guardrail. A cheaper route that keeps missing commitments isn't an efficient one.

No single number tells the story. What matters is how cost, utilisation, capacity and service move against each other.

Why this is sharper in African distribution

A single network here often spans very different operating environments: dense urban outlets, peri-urban customers, rural territories, general trade and modern trade, distributors and sub-distributors, high-volume accounts alongside small outlets that order often. Traffic, road conditions, access and order volumes can change sharply from one territory to the next, and from one week to the next.

A route that worked last month may not be the most productive route today. The map shows where your customers are. It doesn't show how efficiently you can serve them.

From static routes to dynamic planning

Fixed routes persist for good reasons. Drivers know their territories, sales teams know their customers, and established routines are comfortable and reliable.

But demand doesn't stay fixed. Orders swing, priorities change, vehicles go down and new customers appear. A route that was efficient under one set of conditions becomes wasteful under another, and nobody notices because the route hasn't changed.

Dynamic planning replaces "What route do we normally use?" with a better question: given today's orders, vehicles, customers and constraints, how should we allocate our delivery capacity? That's a different way of running distribution, not a tweak to the old one.

Where technology fits

With hundreds of customers, multiple vehicles, varied order sizes and shifting constraints, weighing every possible route combination by hand is close to impossible. Even the best planner is working from a fraction of the options.

Modern route optimisation brings customer locations, order volumes, vehicle capacity, delivery windows, priorities, distance and travel time into one calculation. The aim isn't to replace operational knowledge but to let distribution teams apply it at a scale no spreadsheet or whiteboard can match.

EVA Logistics applies AI-powered route and load optimisation to help businesses plan deliveries around these variables together, including orders, vehicle capacity, locations and delivery requirements. The result is better use of the fleet you already run, sharper delivery planning and real visibility into distribution performance.

The bottom line

Fuel is one cost. The larger question is what inefficient routing does to your time, vehicles, people, delivery capacity, customer service and commercial results.

A route isn't valuable because the vehicle travels little. It's valuable because of how much the vehicle achieves for the business. The next step in distribution efficiency isn't simply driving less. It's distributing more intelligently.

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