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How Route Optimization Can Help Save Time on Delivery, Promote Sustainability, and Increase Profits with Emma Cimolini from Routific
111 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we're delighted to host Emma Cimolini, Director of Marketing at Routific. Listen as Emma shares Routific's mission and how Route Optimization solves the many problems associated with scaling a delivery service.
Show Notes:
Watch Marc Kuo talk about growing your online sales with Routific: https://directfarmconference.com/grow-your-online-sales-with-a-5star-delivery-experience
https://routific.com/
https://www.barn2door.com/resources
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast, the weekly listen for farm selling direct. We'll talk about the four levers for farm success, which are quality, brand, price, and convenience. We'll hear from outside industry experts and producers like you to delight your customers, save time and to increase your direct farm sales and business. We're glad you're here.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hey, this is Bastian from Barn to Door. We recorded this episode of the Direct Farm podcast prior to the Direct Convenience Conference, which was broadcasted on May 4th. So if you'd like to watch the keynote that they referenced in this episode, or any other keynote that was broadcasted during the conference, they are now available in the Direct Farm Conference video archive. Now back to the episode.
RouteTific's Origins and Mission
00:00:47
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast. We've got a terrific conversation for you today with RouteTific, a market leading route optimization solution that helps businesses plan their routes more efficiently, saving both time and money. Barn to door is eager to feature RouteTific CEO and co-founder Mark Kuo as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Direct
00:01:08
Speaker
Convenience Conference on May 4th. And today I am delighted to welcome Emma Chimalini, Marketing Director at RouteTific, as she shares the inspiring story behind RouteTific's history, how their platform works, and an exciting sneak peek into the topics RouteTific will be covering at the upcoming conference. Welcome, Emma.
00:01:28
Speaker
Hi, Alyssa, thanks for having me. Thanks so much for joining us today. So I guess just to get things a bit started here, I'm very interested to know the Rautific story. I understand that the company has been in existence for the past six plus years. Tell us a little bit more about your mission as well as the company's background and story.
00:01:48
Speaker
We were founded back in 2015. Our CEO, Mark, he had actually written his master's thesis on route optimization. He had been in a logistics consultant for a number of years and so he's like been sort of in the world of supply chain management and he realized just how inefficient something called the last mile really is. So last mile is like that in a supply chain, that final mile like where they're at the central depot and they're going out to the homes of a
00:02:17
Speaker
like an address or a home of a customer, right? So that's that final mile in the entire supply chain. And it accounts for a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. So when he was like writing his thesis, it really came from this like vision to reduce greenhouse emissions by making last mile fleets more efficient.
00:02:35
Speaker
And so he realized when he was doing all his consulting is that there's a lot of software out there to tackle the last mile, but a lot of it is super expensive. It's really clunky. It's built for enterprise. And so there really wasn't a lot of options for small businesses, which really make up the vast majority of delivery fleets on the road.
00:02:53
Speaker
And so you fast forward to today, we're now servicing over 1,400 customers in hundreds of cities across the US and around the world, most of whom are small businesses. And really just our main mission is to lead Last Mile routing efficiency worldwide.
Marketing and Customer Engagement at RouteTific
00:03:11
Speaker
So for you specifically, as the marketing director, share a little bit more about your responsibilities and your role at Rotific as well.
00:03:19
Speaker
Yeah, so marketing work with sales, customer success and support to find and help small businesses sign up for a free trial and test drive. So we get thousands of trial signups each month and it's our job to make their experience helpful and useful. So I spend a lot of time talking to customers, collaborating with sales, managing our in-house content team and our external agencies as well to do this.
00:03:45
Speaker
There is this great need for meeting buyers but also meeting the businesses where they're at and understanding how you're able to communicate that to people who may not know what route optimization is and giving them that information.
Route Planning vs. Optimization
00:04:00
Speaker
So can you share some of the data behind the why behind automated route optimization, why it works and how it works?
00:04:07
Speaker
Yeah, I love this question just because, you know, small businesses are trying to do a lot of things, right? Anybody on a small team is wearing a lot of different hats. And so operations is usually not their first forte, especially deliveries. And so like under even just understanding what route optimization is, is often difficult. So a lot of people in the industry, they
00:04:28
Speaker
They think route planning and route optimization are the same thing. They use them as synonyms, but actually like a lot of people think that it's finding like route optimization is the shortest distance or fastest time, like finding the shortest distance or fastest time between point A and point B, which isn't quite right. Route optimization is used when you want to minimize the drive time for multiple stops.
00:04:51
Speaker
while also accounting for a range of complexities like customer time windows or driver schedules. And so route planning is just simply the idea of just planning a route. You can use Google Maps to plan a route of say 10, 20 stops, but they may not be optimized in the correct order.
00:05:09
Speaker
given all of these other constraints, which is sort of the difference. And why you want to automate this process though, is if you've got like 10 or 20 stops, it's not too difficult. Like a human can naturally start to like find an optimal route like that. But when you start to add more stops, like say 50, 100, 200,
00:05:29
Speaker
this starts to become very complex to do it well. And so what we're doing at that point is it's getting into something called the traveling salesman problem, which some people may have heard about. But essentially, for those that haven't, it's essentially about this one salesperson and they need to visit, let's say, 100 cities. And it's all about finding the most efficient route between these different cities. Or in our case,
00:05:51
Speaker
a delivery driver trying to find an efficient route to all these different addresses. Now, what if you suddenly had instead of one salesperson or driver, you had three? This is now called the vehicle routing problem, and it's exponentially more difficult because you have exponentially more combinations. These are problems that mathematicians and computer scientists have been trying to solve for years.
00:06:15
Speaker
Really, there hasn't been a complete solution. The closest we've gotten to is using algorithms. And just to give you a reason why it's so difficult is that, say you had one driver that was trying to complete 57 stops.
00:06:28
Speaker
That's equal to, and I'm going to try and say this word correctly, quattrovengeantillion possible combinations. Wow. So that's essentially one with 75 zeros afterwards. And that's just with like trying to figure out the right stops, let alone the, like adding an additional complexity. So.
00:06:47
Speaker
Route optimization is complex, which makes it very time consuming. So again, if you've got 10 stops, you can do it pretty quickly. But if you've got 100, it's going to start to take a really long time. And then there's the other side of it, which is the fact that it's expensive. The last mile of any kind of delivery route is expensive. It can be up to 50% of your entire, like if you had a global supply chain,
00:07:09
Speaker
it would be 50% of the entire cost of the goods. Like you have like that last mile costs 50% and everything else in the supply chain is the other 50%. So it's expensive. And this is what I actually find really fascinating for small businesses is if any of you out who are listening have tried to do deliveries or you're currently doing deliveries,
00:07:30
Speaker
maybe you're using something like spreadsheets or Google Maps to get things going, it might feel like it's taking too long. It might feel like you want to pull out your hair some days when you get a really big volume of orders all of a sudden that you were accounting for. And the reason for this is that small businesses that are doing local deliveries are stuck with an enterprise-sized problem, but they're trying to use small business tools to solve it.
00:07:56
Speaker
which is a big challenge. It's not easy. And so kind of pointing back I guess to RouteTific and the work that you guys have been doing for the past six plus years, what solution do you provide to this problem with the manual route planning, the time that it takes, the money, and how complex all of these equations are to equate what is the best route for small businesses to take?
00:08:21
Speaker
Yeah. So first and foremost, we, we started with our route optimization algorithm. So our algorithm has been in development for over 10 years now, over a decade. We really put a lot of effort and importance on it. We have a dedicated team to it. And the reason why it's important is because if you're say delivering perishable goods, you're delivering
00:08:42
Speaker
produce or dairy or anything like that, you need to be able to give your customers an accurate ETA of when you're going to arrive so that they can then be prepared to take the delivery and put it in say the fridge so that it stays fresh. You don't want anything left on the doorstep forever.
00:08:58
Speaker
We also know that for small businesses, right? Planning the route is just one part of it. You also need to execute your delivery route. You need to send your drivers on the road and see where these deliveries are. And so we have all of these delivery management features as well to make that leg of the planning process easier. So things like customer notifications or driver apps.
00:09:19
Speaker
And then the other thing that we've really focused on is trying to make our software really easy to use. It really shouldn't be hard for small businesses to adopt another tool because there's a lot of there's a lot of things that, you know, operators are trying to tackle and we want to make some
00:09:37
Speaker
something that could potentially be very complex as easy as possible. Farmers and small business owners are just getting back to doing things that are important for their business like sales and marketing and all those other things that they'd love to focus on.
00:09:52
Speaker
you referred to the produce, the dairy, those, you know, perishable items. So that kind of taps into the businesses that you serve. Can you tell us a little bit more about those types of businesses? Yeah. So we really cater to food and beverage companies that are making deliveries to homes, specifically with like pre-planned delivery routes. So pre-planned versus on demand. So not necessarily restaurants, which would be on demand. Like you make an order and it's delivered instantly.
00:10:21
Speaker
It's more for people who want to do next day deliveries or they have delivery schedules that are on every Saturday, they do their deliveries, that kind of thing. We really do well with people who have perishable goods that need to deliver to consumers because we're going to give you those ETAs, those photo capture, customer notifications, all those delivery management tools to make sure that your goods are going to stay fresh and your customers are going to be very happy with the experience.
00:10:49
Speaker
So we work with a lot of farms, CSA farms, dairies, things like that, as well as things like meal prep services and stuff like that.
Communication's Role in Route Optimization
00:10:57
Speaker
For sure. And you touched on a bit earlier, but I love how the focus is communication and notifications because buyers, I think that's so important to make sure that not only are you providing them with a convenient option, but you have consistent communication throughout letting them know when their delivery is about to arrive.
00:11:13
Speaker
But in addition to that, you also have to communicate to the drivers as well as to any partners or staff involved with the order as well. Can you share a little bit more about that communication process? Yeah, so what we try to do is instead of just automating, like we automate the route optimization, but we also want to automate the communication.
00:11:34
Speaker
And because essentially, you want to just reduce the need for you to triage incoming calls or questions from your staff. And so there's a few ways that we do this. So one is something called customer notifications. So these are automated notifications that can be either in the form of an email or an SMS text message are sent out to the customer to let them know when to expect their delivery because you've optimized your routes. You know that you should arrive at, say, stop A at 1 PM. So you can let the customer know that's the expected
00:12:04
Speaker
estimated time of arrival. Then you can send out a notification of when the driver is close by, when it stops when completed, or if it's been canceled. And say something happens earlier on in the route and it causes a delay with the driver and suddenly all those like initial ETAs are now not correct anymore.
00:12:21
Speaker
it'll automatically send an update to let the customer know. And you don't even have to worry about that. It's just automatically going to send that for you. So you're not spending all this time emailing everybody, oh, no, we're late, and trying to email 100 different people. And this can also be used for your partners as well. Say you're a food hub or something, and you need to pick up supplies from a few different farms, and then do all of your order fulfillment.
00:12:45
Speaker
Well, you can send out these notifications to your partners as well so that they can have everything organized and ready for the driver when they arrive just to make the handoff that much smoother. So that's one way to communicate with your customers or your partners. We also have a driver app so that it makes the driver's experience so much easier. So when you optimize your route, you can dispatch
00:13:08
Speaker
to your drivers through a text. They get a text on their phone, they click a link, and it opens up their specific route in the driver app. In addition to that, you can add in driver notes. So things like, hey, instead of going to the front door, you want to go to the door around the corner of the house.
00:13:25
Speaker
Notes like that make the routes more efficient and also help with some customer service. So your drivers just know exactly what they're doing and they don't have to call into dispatch to figure out, you know, where am I supposed to go? What's happening? Because all the information will be in their phone. And finally, another thing that a lot of our like farm customers will do or meal prep customers will do
00:13:46
Speaker
is they'll plan their delivery route, then they'll download all of the summary and create their pick list from that. So that when they're doing all of their fulfillment, it's an order of the route itself so that everything stays really organized and really streamlined. And it makes like just helping with your employees as they're in the warehouse or the fulfillment center, just that much more aligned towards this common goal of like the organized route.
00:14:12
Speaker
That's great. And just to hear about convenience on both sides, because I think sometimes you hone in on convenience for the buyer. Yes, that's important, but also convenience as a farmer, as working with partners as well and your drivers, making sure that you're able to conveniently and efficiently work through those steps through that process.
00:14:31
Speaker
So kind of touching a little bit more on the buyer side, the importance of that buyer loyalty and developing that is based on those fundamentals of customer service, thorough and timely and consistent support. In addition to those notifications, how do you help small businesses or encourage them, I guess, to provide that exceptional experience for their buyers?
00:14:53
Speaker
There's a lot of ways that you can kind of improve your customer service through the delivery experience. You're able to be transparent with the ETAs and customer notifications, and then with a good route optimization, you can follow through on that commitment. That alone is a great level of service. But in addition to that, like things like in the driver notes that you're leaving, it's not even just saying, hey, go to this store versus this store. You can add in things inside there which says,
00:15:18
Speaker
don't ring the doorbell because a baby is sleeping inside, right? These little pieces, like bits of, you know, personal touch or insight go a long way to creating a positive experience for the customer. And also too, if you're using software now to do all your route optimization, you know, some people, it saves them hours in the day, like three hours a day. So you now can add in potentially some more complexity than you were before. So you could offer preferred time windows.
00:15:44
Speaker
to your customers instead of just saying hey we go, we deliver on Saturdays and then you let them know that you'll be there at some point. You can actually give them the option to say hey I want my delivery between one and 3pm, for example, because now the software can account for these things.
00:16:00
Speaker
In addition to that, you want to make sure that you're offering them an online ordering system as well, so that they can build their order, check out, and do everything without ever having to talk to customer support. 76% of consumers are expecting you to use an online ordering system. But regardless, everything is becoming automated and making it convenient. So people can order something from you at 11 PM at night, and you're still going to get the order for the next day.
00:16:26
Speaker
And then the last thing I want to touch on is has nothing to do with technology or automation. It's really kind of going back to the basics because what can really make you stand out is adding a personal touch. So, you know, things like handwritten notes or maybe samples to try and upsell some people that you can include with each delivery. Maybe you want to add in, I don't know, family recipes to use with some of the ingredients someone just ordered.
00:16:51
Speaker
These are all ways to use your delivery offering as a way for a marketing tool, retention, upsells, surprise and delight, which go a really long way. So you can kind of go even above and beyond just like the operational side and go into the marketing and sales side as well.
00:17:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it's so important to focus in on that buyer loyalty because that's how you're able to establish recurring cash flow, subscriptions, you mentioned CSA boxes, so having those buyers buy in because they're having a great experience. And then in addition to that, they're able to share their experience through their channels with other people in their community as
Environmental Impact and Cost Efficiency
00:17:29
Speaker
well.
00:17:29
Speaker
And then from just kind of, I guess, pivoting a bit on a community perspective, talking about all the benefits to route optimization from a carbon footprint standpoint, in addition to everything we've already talked about with automated, but thinking about the environment and thinking about how important it is to take care of, you know, the community that we live in and the world we live in. So maybe kind of focusing in a little bit more about the mission of RouteTific and what it means to you as an employee working there to improve
00:17:58
Speaker
fuel efficiency across the globe.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, I really, I love talking about this because it's probably one of the main reasons why I even started working at RouteTific was I wanted to work at somewhere where it had a positive impact on the environment. And so what RouteTific is able to do with its software is because of the route optimization, we're able to reduce drive time on a particular route by up to 40%. So that means like 40% less fuel being consumed on the routes.
00:18:29
Speaker
Or alternatively, what it means is that you can add more stops to your route without adding more drivers because now they're more efficient. So you can now scale your deliveries without adding new drivers, which saves you money. But it's also better for the environment because it'll lower the carbon footprint of all of the stops on that given route in one go. Just as you add more, you're spending less fuel per stop, right?
00:18:53
Speaker
And what we were actually able to do is we were able to calculate the impact of people who are switching from manual route planning to route optimization and the impact that has on the environment. So what we define as manual route planning, this is things like spreadsheets or Google maps.
00:19:10
Speaker
a lot of businesses, what they do is they might even divide up all their deliveries into territories and give a stack of addresses to one driver that's covering one specific territory. These are all very manual ways of managing routes and the overwhelming majority of SMBs still plan their routes manually. We actually surveyed over 11,000 SMBs and we found that 72% of them were still planning their routes manually.
00:19:37
Speaker
What we were actually able to calculate was that for every driver you employ full-time, working five days a week, if you switch from manual route planning to route optimization, or route planning software with route optimization, that's the equivalent of planting 86 trees per year for that one driver alone. So if you're thinking about SMBs, like 72% of them are still planning routes manually. They all have at least one driver. That is a lot that can impact on the environment.
00:20:06
Speaker
That's huge. And just knowing that not only is it backed by data, but also thinking from individual business to business and thinking about how the impact now is going to have on the future as well. So that's encouraging to see as
00:20:23
Speaker
more people continue to adopt and see the benefits for their business, but also for the environment by pursuing this as an option.
Preview of Future Keynote
00:20:30
Speaker
At the beginning of this conversation, we kind of touched briefly on how Barnes-Dor is going to have the RouteTific CEO and co-founder, Mark, as a keynote speaker at our upcoming conference, our direct conference on May 4th. Can you share just a little bit more about the best practices and tactics that you'll be sharing with farmers in this presentation?
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah, so one of the things he's going to talk about is just route planning best practices. Like at this point, you know, Mark's had the chance to chat with probably thousands of small businesses. So over the years, he's been able to really hone in on what works, what doesn't, what are the common pitfalls. Also dive into maybe some grocery shopping trends and some buyer expectations for deliveries.
00:21:12
Speaker
So, you know, farmers that are at the conference can kind of preemptively get ahead of expectations and set themselves up for success if they're launching their delivery program or trying to scale it. And then finally, he's going to kind of go over how to calculate and optimize your cost per delivery, which is essential if you want your deliveries to be profitable.
00:21:33
Speaker
So there's a lot of really cool stuff to dig into. If anyone hasn't registered for the conference yet, I really encourage you guys to do so. Lots of fun things to learn. I think everyone would want to be making a profit on their delivery. So everyone should be signing up because for sure there are great insights and Mark's presentation. You don't want to miss that. So thank you so much, Emma. Before we sign off here, do you have any final recommendations or suggestions for farmers?
00:21:59
Speaker
The only thing I would say is that deliveries really don't have to be hard. In fact, they can be really profitable, but all you got to do is just find the right tools. So there's a lot of different options out there. Love for you guys to check out Rhetific, but also check out anything else that you might find and just, it's all about finding what works for you. Awesome. Well, thank you again, Emma, for joining us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.
00:22:22
Speaker
And I also just want to extend my thanks to the entire team at RouteTific. We look forward to partnering with RouteTific to give farmers the best in-class route optimization tools they need to increase sales, save time, and improve efficiencies in their business. For more information on the upcoming Direct Conference featuring RouteTific CEO Mark Kuo, as well as other industry experts and farm advisors, you can visit directfarmconference.com to register for this free virtual event.
00:22:49
Speaker
And for more information on RouteTiffic, you can go to their website as well, RouteTiffic.com. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you next time.