For a small shred company, dispatch is a morning ritual: look at who's due, split the stops between trucks, put them in order and hand drivers their list. Route software should make that a few minutes of work and make the bad days, like a broken-down truck or a snowstorm, manageable.
What good route software does
- Starts from the schedule, so the day's stops are already there
- Lets you put each job on a truck and driver, and change your mind easily
- Shows the stops on a map and lets you put them in order
- Estimates how long the day will run, including drive time and time at each stop
- Warns you before a route runs into overtime
- Sends the route to the driver's phone, with gate codes and special instructions
- Handles bad days in one step: move a truck's stops to another truck, swap drivers, or push everything to the next business day
Fully automatic or you in control?
Some routing tools reorder every stop automatically. That suits large fleets with hundreds of stops. Small shred companies often know things the software doesn't: the clinic that must be first, the loading dock that closes at noon. For them, a tool that lets you order stops with clear drive-time estimates is often more useful than a black box.
Questions to ask
- 1What does the driver see if the route changes after they've started?
- 2Can a driver work the route with no signal?
- 3What happens to stops that weren't serviced today?
- 4Can I print a route sheet as a backup?
How Trakro does it
In Trakro, you drag the day's jobs onto trucks, put stops in order and see an estimated day length with overtime warnings. Publish, and routes land on drivers' phones. You can move a broken-down truck's stops or push a snow day to the next business day in one step. Trakro doesn't reorder stops automatically today; you stay in control of the order.
Let Trakro handle the paperwork.
Certificates, chain of custody and invoices, built from every stop.