Every snow removal contractor and dispatcher knows the administrative work that arrives before each season: rebuilding the routes and assigning them to drivers.
Before every season the customer list changes. New properties come on, old ones drop off. Access arrangements change too, and keys and gate codes have to be matched back to the right sites.
On top of that you have local conditions to account for — construction, one-way changes, a lot that is being resurfaced — and you have to make sure every driver ends up with a route of roughly the same length. That is what makes snow removal route planning genuinely complex.
Planning with a paper map
Every operation solves this its own way. Usually a spreadsheet holds the property list and is maintained laboriously by hand. The hardest part is recording the route itself accurately. Often that means a printed street map with every plowing and salting segment marked carefully by hand.
Then routes have to be built out of those markings. The addresses are exported into a table, and that table is manually sorted into the right order. Notes for individual stops get added.
After that comes managing keys and access codes against properties. And finally the drivers have to be told about their new route and walked through it. Taken together, route administration is a significant hidden cost in a snow removal operation.
Planning with software
There are plenty of route management systems on the market. Most of them come from freight and general transport, and very few have taken on the specific complexity of planning and optimizing snow removal work.
So we built one. We went through the planning process step by step and worked out how to represent each step digitally as efficiently as possible. What came out is a route management system that supports winter work from planning through optimization and administration to navigating the driver.
First, as the supervisor, you have all your addresses and customers on one map. You can import existing stops, or even existing routes, from a CSV or spreadsheet. That usually takes less than a minute.
Then you assemble the route around your own priorities — special customers first, say. Optimization happens with a single click on Optimize. That puts up to 140 stops per route into the most efficient order in moments, which means minimum fuel use and the fastest possible completion.
Stops can carry notes, so drivers get precise instructions where they need them. Adding a new stop is a click on the map.
Once the season's planning is done, routes are assigned to individual drivers. Drivers only need the xRouten app on their Android phone or iPhone.
In the app they see their stops as a to-do list in the right order, along with your notes on each property. They press Go and are navigated from stop to stop, with current traffic taken into account.
Completed stops turn green, visible both in the office and to the drivers on the road. GPS adds transparency: you can see where your drivers are at any moment, which saves a lot of time on customer calls. There is more on that in GPS driver tracking for snow removal.
Winter work is a conservative trade, and that is fine
Technology has worked its way through a lot of industries, because the benefits of applying it to repetitive work are hard to argue with. Snow removal is no exception, even if it is a trade that holds on to its traditions — and there are good reasons for some of those traditions, because at 3am a system nobody trusts is worse than a piece of paper everybody understands.
But look at the equipment. Vehicles get more efficient, faster to deploy, more economical and quieter every season. The same can be true of the administration around them. The preparation and wrap-up of each season generate a large amount of office work that could be solved differently.
That is exactly why we built xRouten: so you and your drivers can concentrate on the work itself rather than on administering it.
If you would like to try modern route planning for your winter operation, free and with no obligation, start a trial or get in touch and we will walk you through it.
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