When is route optimisation software actually worth it?

When the problem is complex enough to defeat a person, planning is still manual or semi-manual, and orders come out of a system without manual re-entry. Miss one of the three and the answer changes: under ten stops with fixed customers the margin is thin, and without exportable data any optimiser adds data entry instead of removing it.

Why do stops per route matter more than the other factors?

Because the number of possible sequences grows explosively with stops. At ten stops an experienced planner gets close to optimal by eye; at thirty the solution space is too large for intuition. That is why the stops question carries double weight in the score.

What does the gap between plan and execution measure?

It measures how realistic the plan is. If the executed route consistently drifts from the planned one, the plan is ignoring real constraints the drivers know and the system does not. Those who do not measure it usually have the widest gap, and no way to show afterwards whether an optimisation investment worked.

Is the result a sales pitch?

No, and in two cases out of four the verdict says not to buy now. The tool exists to separate those who would benefit from an optimiser from those with a different problem upstream, because a demo run on the wrong profile wastes everyone’s time.

Self-assessment · 8 questions

Is your route worth optimising?

Not every route is. There are operations where an optimiser recovers weeks of work a year, and others where it moves nothing because the real problem sits elsewhere. Eight questions separate the two, and in two outcomes out of four the answer is that you do not need one today.

How the score works

The verdict is not the sum of the answers. The eight questions feed three separate axes, and how they combine matters more than the total: a high total can come from a simple problem handled badly, and in that case the right answer is not to buy an optimiser.

Problem complexity (0–12 points): How hard the route is in itself: number of stops, demand variability, constraints to respect. Below a certain threshold a good human planner competes with any solver.
Process headroom (0–9 points): The distance between how you plan today and how you could plan. Whoever already runs an optimiser that works well has little to gain from another optimiser.
Data readiness (0–4 points): Whether the data an optimiser needs exists and is reachable. This is where most projects stop, and it does not depend on the software.

The order they are read in

1. Complexity. If the problem is too simple, no other score counts: an optimiser has no room to do better than you.
2. Data readiness. If orders do not come out of any system, software is not the bottleneck and buying it now does not fix anything.
3. Process headroom. Only here do we decide whether the gain is on one lever or on all of them: whoever already plans well recovers less than whoever plans by hand.