trakki
Drive times in field sales: why the day runs long
By Manuel Ober · · 5 min read
The 40 minutes missing from every day
You plan six calls, manage five, and still get home later than you thought. That is not chance and not a question of discipline. It is a sum: a few minutes per leg, a few per call, and at the end an hour is gone. Exactly the hour that is missing at the last customer, or at dinner.
The sat nav is not to blame. It does its job: it tells you, as you set off, how long the next leg takes, and it does that fairly precisely. What it does not tell you on Friday is whether six calls will fit into Tuesday.
The sat nav knows the leg, the plan needs the day
Planning a week means knowing the drive times for every leg of a day before you set off. For six calls that is seven legs, in the order they happen, at the time they happen.
Google Maps can do it, but by hand: type in the start address, type in the destination, set the departure time, read off the time, next pair. Seven times. And if you swap two calls because one can only see you in the afternoon, start again. Hardly anyone does that every Friday for five days. So it gets estimated: “that one is about half an hour away”. And the estimate remembers the best run, not the typical one.
That is the first item: the drive time in the plan is not the drive time the sat nav shows you later.
The items that appear in no sat nav
Even with all seven legs worked out, four things are still missing.
Arriving and getting away. Finding a parking space, walking to the entrance, waiting until somebody has time, then back to the car and out of the town again. For a pharmacy in a pedestrian zone that is easily ten minutes, and no drive time contains them. Reckon on five to ten minutes per call, depending on the location.
Opening hours. A pharmacy that is closed from 12:30 to 14:00 is not 20 minutes away at 12:45, it is 95. Opening hours dictate the order, and the order dictates the drive times.
The break. Anyone who does not plan it takes it anyway, only at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Half an hour for lunch belongs in the plan, ideally where a customer is closed anyway.
The time of day. The same run through a city takes 25 minutes at 8am and 40 at 4:30pm. The sat nav knows that when you set off. The plan has to know it beforehand.
The fifth item: when somebody cancels
If the third appointment on Tuesday cancels at nine in the morning, the whole day is different. The leg from customer 2 to customer 4 is not the leg from 2 to 3, and perhaps a customer planned for Thursday now fits in between.
With a sat nav and a notebook that means working it out again at the roadside. Mostly nothing gets worked out, people just drive, and the day frays. A plan that knows the drive times recalculates the rest of the day as soon as a call drops out or gets moved.
An example day, once from memory and once worked out
Five customers in a rural territory, starting from home at 8am.
| Leg | From memory | Worked out |
|---|---|---|
| Home to customer 1 | 25 min | 31 min |
| Customer 1 to customer 2 | 15 min | 22 min |
| Customer 2 to customer 3 | 20 min | 28 min |
| Customer 3 to customer 4 | 10 min | 19 min |
| Customer 4 to customer 5 | 20 min | 26 min |
| Customer 5 back home | 30 min | 41 min |
| Total | 2 h 00 | 2 h 47 |
47 minutes of difference, without parking, without the pharmacy that closes at 12:30, without the cancellation. With all of that it is over an hour. That is the difference between home at 5pm and home at 6:15pm.
How to win the time back
- Work out every leg of the day, not just the next one. At the time it actually happens.
- Five to ten minutes of arriving per call. Fixed in the plan, not in your head.
- Record the opening hours at the customer. Once, and they count in every plan from then on.
- Break where somebody is closed anyway. That saves a leg.
- One buffer per day. One call that can drop out without the others wobbling.
- Have it recalculated when somebody cancels, instead of guessing again.
Doing all that by hand takes longer than the calls themselves. That is why it is the job of a route planner, not of the sat nav. How the week comes together as a whole is in the guide Route planning in field sales.
How trakki does it
trakki works out every leg of a day as a real road time, lays out the day with opening hours, arriving and a break, and shows the times at every appointment. Move a call or lose one, and the rest recalculates. trakki does not know about rush hours and traffic jams; that is what the buffer per day is for. The navigation to the next customer is handed over to the sat nav of your choice, because for the single leg the sat nav is the right tool.
Trying it costs nothing. More on the home page.
Frequently asked questions
Is Google Maps with several stops not enough?
For the driving on the day itself, yes. For the planning, no: Maps does not know your customers' opening hours, the length of a call, the break or the due dates. It works out the route between destinations you give it. Choosing which destinations, and in which order, is the actual planning.
How accurate are calculated drive times?
On a normal day, to within five minutes per leg. Not with accidents and roadworks; that is what the buffer is for. Compare at the end of the week and most people find the calculated time was closer than the estimate, on every single leg.
What about drives across the border?
Drive times work everywhere there is road data, so across the whole of Europe. Address search is different: the official address register exists only for Austria; abroad the search runs through a general map service and finds addresses a little less precisely.