Fleet Route Planning Software Built Around the Constraints
A route is only as good as what the planner was allowed to know. KO Fleetz turns the things currently held in someone's memory into constraints the plan is built from: the yard an artic cannot enter, the customer who receives before nine, the drop that always takes forty minutes.
The plan looked fine on the map
Forty drops go into a spreadsheet. They get sorted roughly by postcode, split into four runs, and handed out. The time windows live in a comments column that the planner reads and the driver never sees. The bridge on the approach to stop nineteen is 4.1 metres and that fact exists in exactly one head, currently on annual leave.
By half past ten the run is broken. The seventh drop only receives between seven and nine, so it comes back on the truck. The vehicle that got the industrial estate is the artic, because the rigid was in for a brake test, and the artic cannot turn in that yard. None of this was unknowable. It just was not written anywhere the plan could see it.
Then comes the argument nobody can win. The transport manager says the plan was sound and the drivers ran it badly. The drivers say the plan never had a chance. Both are describing the same day and neither has the plan as it was published, because the plan was a printout that got amended in biro and thrown away at six.
Encode what must be true, then build the sequence
Constraints stop being folklore and become fields. A stop carries its opening windows, its realistic service duration, its access notes and the vehicle classes that can physically reach it. A vehicle carries its height, weight limits, body type, tail-lift and capacity in both weight and volume. A driver carries licence class and site certifications. The sequence is then built from things that are recorded rather than remembered.
KO Fleetz publishes each plan as a version. The day's actual arrivals, departures and service times are held against it, which turns the argument into a comparison: this stop was planned for 10:15 and the vehicle arrived at 10:09 and left at 11:02. Now the discussion is about the forty-minute overrun at one customer, which is a solvable problem, rather than about who is at fault in general.
This module does not go looking for the cheapest possible arrangement of stops. It gives you a workable, constraint-respecting sequence and lets you edit it directly, because a planner who cannot drag a stop will not use the tool. Searching the space of alternatives against a cost objective is route optimization, and it sits on top of exactly these constraints. Planning also stops at the gate: it does not give turn-by-turn navigation, and it does not know which of the two entrances to use at three in the morning.
Capabilities
What KO Fleetz route planning gives your team
Time windows and service durations
Each stop holds when it can receive and how long it realistically takes, so a drop with a two-hour window cannot land at position twelve.
Vehicle capability profiles
Height, axle configuration, body type and tail-lift are attributes of the vehicle, so a plan cannot send an artic to a yard that only takes a rigid.
Capacity by weight and volume
Loads are checked against both, which matters because a full-cube van of empty packaging is legal and a half-empty one of tiles is not.
Multi-drop sequencing
Stops are ordered into a runnable sequence with arrival estimates at each, including the return leg and the time it takes to get back to the yard.
Template and recurring routes
Runs that repeat weekly start from the version that worked, so a planner adjusts a known route instead of rebuilding one from an empty map.
Site access notes on the stop
Gate codes, approach restrictions and the bay that floods in winter travel with the stop to whoever gets it next, rather than staying with one driver.
Plan versioning
KO Fleetz keeps every published plan as it went out, so a change made at 05:40 is attributable and the day can be judged against what was actually issued.
Plan against actual
KO Fleetz sets planned and real arrival, departure and service time side by side per stop, exposing the customer whose ten-minute drop is never ten minutes.
How it works
How KO Fleetz does it
Step 1: Bring in the stops
Orders arrive from your order system or a file, each with an address, a quantity and whatever window the customer agreed to.
Step 2: Encode the constraints once
Customer windows, site access and vehicle capabilities are set up against the customer and the asset, not retyped into every plan that touches them.
Step 3: Build and edit the sequence
The platform proposes a runnable order with estimated arrivals. The planner moves stops directly and immediately sees which constraint the move breaks.
Step 4: Publish to dispatch
The plan goes to the board as a version, where it gets a driver and a vehicle. The plan and the allocation stay separate records.
Step 5: Compare against the day
Actual arrivals and service times land against the published plan. Consistent overruns become constraint corrections for next time.
Outcomes
What changes
- Plans built from recorded rules, not from recall
- Constraint-first
- Each route keeps the version it is judged against
- Plan vs actual
- Repeating runs start from the plan that worked
- Reusable
- Sequences the assigned truck can physically run
- Vehicle-aware
Frequently asked questions
Planning is where you state the rules and produce a sequence a driver can run. Optimization is a search: given those same rules, it explores many arrangements and returns the one that scores best against an objective you choose. Planning is the prerequisite, because an optimiser can only respect constraints that exist as data. Fleets that skip straight to optimisation get an elegant answer to a question that left out the bridge, the window and the forty-minute customer.
No, and you should not invent them. A stop with no window is planned as unconstrained, which is honest and often correct. Plenty of sites take a delivery whenever it turns up. Enter windows where they are real and contractual, because a fictional window is worse than none: it constrains the plan for no reason and pushes work into shapes the day never required. Start with the customers who have actually rejected a delivery for arriving early.
No. The sequence and the stops hand off to the navigation app the driver already uses and trusts. Building a second navigation experience would mean competing with tools that have far better road data and far more attention from the driver, and losing. What KO Fleetz owns is the order of the stops, the constraints behind that order, and the record of what happened at each one.
It plans around the ones it knows about, and the honest answer is that road restriction data is uneven. Truck-attribute map data covers major networks well and rural or recently changed infrastructure less well. That is why site access notes and vehicle profiles matter as much as the map: your drivers already know which approaches do not work, and a note captured once on the stop protects every future driver. Do not treat any planner's map as a substitute for that knowledge.
Possibly not for the sequencing, and that is worth saying. If the runs are stable and the drivers know them, the sequence is already solved. The value moves to the other things a plan carries: the constraints written down where a relief driver can read them, the arrival record that shows which customer's turnaround is drifting, and the version history that survives the planner leaving. If none of that hurts today, planning is not your bottleneck.
Each vehicle carries its own profile rather than inheriting a fleet default, so a plan built for a 7.5-tonne with a tail-lift will not quietly accept a tractor unit as a substitute. When dispatch swaps the assigned vehicle, KO Fleetz rechecks the plan against the new profile and any stop the replacement cannot serve is flagged before the driver leaves. Mixed fleets are where profiles earn their keep; a uniform fleet barely notices they exist.
Get one day's drops planned against real constraints
Send us a route sheet and the rules your planner keeps in his head. We will show you the plan when they are written down.