The round exists in one planner's head
Few operators run only their own vehicles. Heavy Tech holds subcontracted hauliers, their lorries and their drivers the same way it holds yours, so a load on someone else’s truck carries the same record as one on your own.
Good, unwritten, and unavailable next week
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 unmeasured and undocumented. When volumes change or a new area comes on there is nothing to adjust — only somebody to ask, and only if they are in.
The other half of the problem is what comes back. Twenty drops completed, twenty scribbles on a sheet, read into an invoice run three days later. When a customer says a delivery never arrived, the answer is a filing box and an argument.
Heavy Tech orders the round against real road distances, lets the planner overrule it, and brings back a signature and a photograph from every stop.
What tends to be hard
- Routes ordered to cut empty running across a mixed own and subcontracted fleet
- Subcontractor lorries and drivers held to the same record as your own
- Drivers seeing their own work on a phone rather than a printed sheet
- Proof of delivery captured at the stop, with a signature and a photograph
- Completed stops billed without anyone reading a paper docket back into a system
How it runs on a mixed fleet
Building the week
Routes laid out on a weekly calendar across own and subcontracted vehicles, with route areas grouping work geographically.
Ordering the drops
Three algorithms over real road distances, then a planner’s override where local knowledge beats the matrix. See routes and deliveries.
Proving it happened
A signature and a photograph captured at the stop and stored against proof of delivery, so a dispute months later has an answer.
Billing it
Completed stops grouped by customer and invoiced from what the driver actually did rather than what was planned.
Questions we get asked
How does Heavy Tech order a route?
Three ways, and you choose per route. Nearest neighbour always takes the closest unvisited stop. OSRM Trip hands the round to OSRM’s own travelling-salesman solver. Two-opt starts from nearest neighbour and then un-crosses pairs of legs until it stops improving.
Are the distances real road distances?
Yes, from an OSRM distance matrix. If the routing service cannot be reached it falls back to straight-line Haversine distances and carries on rather than failing the route.
Can a planner override the result?
Yes, by dragging stops into a different order. The optimiser does not know which lane floods or which gate has been locked since March.
Does it handle subcontracted hauliers?
Yes. Haulier routes sit alongside your own with their own calendar and list views, their own drivers and their own vehicles.
What does a driver get?
An app showing their own routes and nothing else. They open a stop, complete it, and capture a signature and a photograph, which come back as proof of delivery against the record.
How are completed stops billed?
An invoice run reads completed route stops directly and groups them by customer. Nobody reads a paper docket back into a system. See invoicing.