Planned in the office, signed for at the kerb
Build the week on a calendar, let the optimiser order the drops, and send it to the driver's phone. The signature and the photograph come back against the stop.
HG4 3LB
HG3 3QN
HG3 3SG
Main Street
HG3 3PY
HG3 3NR
HG4 3NR
HG4 3RT
HG4 3BW
Silver Street
HG4 4DX
HG4 3HT
HG4 5EN
Northfield Way
HG4 5NB
HG4 5AJ
HG4 5AN
HG4 5BJ
HG4 1QW
The order the orders were taken in, which is to say no order at all.
The route screen, rebuilt here so you can work it. Press Optimise Route, pick an algorithm, and the stops reorder and the legs redraw. Customers and addresses are invented; the sixteen coordinates are real, and every mileage on it was computed from them.
The round exists in one planner's head
On most yards the round is ordered by someone who has been doing it for fifteen years, on a printed sheet, and it is genuinely good. It is also unwritten, unmeasured, and unavailable the week they are off. When volumes change or a new area comes on, there is nothing to adjust — only somebody to ask.
The other half of the problem is what comes back. A driver completes twenty drops and returns a sheet with twenty scribbles on it, which somebody reads into an invoice run three days later. When a customer says a delivery never arrived, the answer is a filing box.
Three ways to order a round
None of them is right for every route, which is why the planner chooses and can then overrule the result.
Nearest neighbour
Start at the depot and always take the closest stop you have not yet visited. Quick, predictable, and hard to argue with on a tight urban round where the drops are all within a few miles of each other.
OSRM Trip
Hands the whole round to OSRM's travelling-salesman solver and takes the order it returns. Usually the best answer on a spread-out rural round where greedy choices early on cost you badly later.
Two-opt
Takes the nearest-neighbour order and then looks for pairs of legs that cross, reversing the section between them whenever it shortens the route. Repeats until no swap helps. This is the one that removes the obvious mistakes.
And then a person
Stops drag into a new order after the fact. The optimiser does not know which farm track floods, which customer will not take a delivery before ten, or which gate has been locked since March.
The week before it happens
Seven columns, one per day. Every card carries its stop count, its lorry and its driver, so a planner can see on Monday morning what Thursday is already carrying.
What's in it
- Three ordering algorithms — nearest neighbour, OSRM Trip, and two-opt improvement
- Distance matrices from OSRM, falling back to Haversine when the routing service is unreachable
- A weekly calendar view alongside a list view, for own fleet and subcontracted hauliers
- Drag-and-drop stop reordering when the planner knows better than the algorithm
- Route areas for grouping work geographically, and rounds for repeating collections
- Driver app for listing the day’s routes, viewing a stop, and completing it
- Signature and photo capture at the stop, stored against proof of delivery
- Call-off loads against a contract, with waypoints edited on the route
- Products needed per route, cash collected, and a driver-returned reconciliation
Questions we get asked
Which algorithms does Heavy Tech use to order a route?
Three. Nearest neighbour always takes the closest unvisited stop — fast, and good enough for a compact round. OSRM Trip hands the problem to OSRM’s own travelling-salesman solver. Two-opt starts from a nearest-neighbour order and then repeatedly un-crosses pairs of legs until it stops improving. You pick per route.
Where do the distances come from?
A distance matrix from OSRM, which uses real road distances rather than straight lines. If the routing service cannot be reached, it falls back to a Haversine matrix and carries on with straight-line distances rather than failing the route.
Can a planner override the optimiser?
Yes, and they often should. Stops can be dragged into a different order after optimisation. A planner who knows a lane is unsuitable for an eight-wheeler knows something the distance matrix does not.
Does it handle subcontracted hauliers as well as our own vehicles?
Yes. Haulier routes are held alongside your own, with their own calendar and list views, their own drivers and their own vehicles. A load on a subcontractor’s lorry carries the same record as one on yours.
What does the driver see?
A driver logs into the app and sees their own routes and nothing else. They open a stop, complete it, and capture a signature and a photograph against it, which come back as proof of delivery on the record.
Can we run repeating collections?
Yes. Rounds hold work that repeats, and route areas group stops geographically. Orders can carry a frequency, so a regular customer does not need re-entering every week.