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How to plan six vans without a spreadsheet
Planning six delivery vans on a spreadsheet works until a driver calls in sick or a round runs long, at which point every other row has to be manually rebalanced by hand. A route plan needs to hold real constraints, capacity, time windows, driver shifts, and update them live, which is exactly where a static spreadsheet stops being useful.
Why a spreadsheet is fine at first
With one or two vans, a spreadsheet is genuinely the right tool. Someone who knows the round can look at a short list of drops, order them sensibly by road and by customer opening time, and adjust it by eye if something changes. The whole plan fits on one screen and one person's memory covers the gaps.
Where it stops working
Six vans is a different problem, not a bigger version of the same one. Six rounds means six sets of constraints running at once - van capacity, because a chiller van can only carry so much and some products cannot travel with others, delivery windows some kitchens genuinely enforce, driver shift limits, and the order drops actually have to happen in, which is rarely the order they were typed into the sheet. A spreadsheet holds all of that as static rows. It has no idea that van three is now over capacity because a large order landed at ten last night, and it will not tell anyone until somebody notices on the morning, usually while the van is already being loaded.
Say a round of twenty drops takes on average twelve minutes each, door to door, across driving, parking and the handover - that is four hours before anything goes wrong. The moment one driver calls in sick, those twenty drops do not disappear, they have to be absorbed by the remaining five vans, each of which already has its own four hours planned. Working out which five drops move where, without breaking anyone's time window or overloading a van that has no room left, is a real optimisation problem, not a five-minute rearrange on a spreadsheet, however good the person doing it is.
Six vans is not double the planning of three. It is six sets of constraints running against each other at once.
What actually needs to be true of a real route plan
A route plan for six vans has to hold every constraint at the same time and recompute quickly when one of them changes: which van has room left, which customer needs to be hit before eight, which driver's shift ends at one, which two products cannot travel in the same crate. None of those constraints can be honoured by eye once there are six vans doing it simultaneously, because a change to any one of them changes what is possible for all the others.
A wholesaler running six vans is also running more drops than the maths of a spreadsheet comfortably serves - even a modest round of twenty stops per van across six vans is 120 individual deliveries a day, each with its own window and its own priority, recalculated every time the order book changes overnight. That is squarely the kind of problem an optimiser is built for and a spreadsheet is not: not because the spreadsheet is a bad tool, but because it was never built to hold six sets of moving constraints and rebalance them automatically when one breaks.
The constraints, named plainly
It helps to be specific about what a route plan is actually juggling, because the word optimisation sounds abstract until the list is in front of you: how much weight and volume each van can carry, and whether chilled and ambient goods need separate compartments; which customers have a hard delivery window, a kitchen that is only staffed to receive between seven and nine, say; how long each driver is contracted or willing to work that morning; which products cannot travel together for food safety reasons; and the order the drops need to happen in to avoid doubling back across the same road twice. A plan that satisfies all of those at once, for six vans simultaneously, is not something a person redraws from scratch every morning with a pen - not because they are not capable of it, but because the number of workable combinations grows far faster than the number of vans.
None of this is a case against knowing the round. The driver who has done the same streets for years still spots a closed road or a useful shortcut no map ever will. The plan is a starting point that holds the hard rules correctly before the human judgement gets applied on top of it, not a replacement for the person doing the driving.
What good planning actually buys back
The value is not a cleverer-looking route. It is the time a manager currently spends every morning manually rebalancing a plan that changed overnight, and the drops that get missed or arrive outside a customer's window because nobody caught the knock-on effect of an earlier change in time. Getting that arithmetic done automatically and correctly, every time a driver calls in sick or an order lands late, is the actual saving - not a shorter route, a shorter morning.
Plainly
What it will not do on its own
- It will not drive the van. Every constraint it respects still has to be entered correctly, and a driver still has to execute the round on the road.
- It does not know a customer has moved premises or changed their delivery window until somebody tells it - a route plan is only as good as the constraints it has been given.
- It cannot fix a round that was never viable in the first place. If six vans genuinely cannot cover the day's drops, the answer is a seventh van, not a cleverer plan for six.
- Compartment and product-type constraints, such as what can and cannot travel together, only protect the load if they were set up correctly for each vehicle.
Questions people ask
- How many vans can a spreadsheet realistically manage?
- One or two vans work fine on a spreadsheet, because a single person can hold the whole plan in their head and adjust it by eye. Beyond that, each additional van adds a full set of its own constraints, capacity, time windows, driver shifts, running against every other van's constraints at once, which a static spreadsheet cannot recompute on its own.
- What happens when a driver calls in sick with six vans running?
- Every drop on that round has to be redistributed across the remaining five vans without breaking any van's capacity or any customer's delivery window, which is a genuine optimisation problem under time pressure, not a quick manual rearrange, especially done at short notice before the morning's vans are due to leave.
- What is route optimisation software actually solving?
- It is holding every hard constraint, how much each van can carry, which customer needs delivery by a certain time, how long each driver's shift can run, what cannot travel in the same load, at the same time, and recalculating a valid plan the moment any one of them changes, rather than leaving a person to rebalance the whole plan by hand.
- Is route planning software worth it for a small fleet?
- For one or two vans, usually not, because a person can plan that by eye as well as software can. The value grows sharply from around four or five vans upward, once the number of constraints running against each other at once outpaces what one person can hold in their head each morning.
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