How much can you save on delivery routes?

The kilometre range (10–20%) comes from industry benchmarks on route optimization: the reference academic literature documents savings of 5–20% of transportation costs when moving from manual to algorithmic planning (Toth & Vigo, The Vehicle Routing Problem, SIAM). Where you land depends on how good your current planning already is, on stop density and on constraints (time windows, restricted traffic zones, capacity).

The planning hours recovered are often the most immediate benefit: building the routes goes from hours to minutes, and the planner's time goes back to managing exceptions instead of filling spreadsheets. We estimate 60–80% of the declared time recovered.

The euro range only counts fuel and wear (cost/km). It does not include the benefits that are harder to standardise — fewer vehicles for the same deliveries, less overtime, fewer delivery errors — which in many cases are worth more than the fuel. In that sense the estimate is conservative.

If the result looks high: your manual planning is probably already good, and you will land near the bottom of the range. If it looks low: remember it is an estimate on km and hours only. Either way the next step is the same — a test on your actual routes, which returns the real number instead of a benchmark.