The delivery world moves fast. Each morning millions of packages are scanned, assigned routes, and loaded onto designated vehicles. Once trucks depart, drivers actively work against the clock to deliver all packages onboard. But, as the saying goes, whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. And so it does with deliveries.
Drivers find packages not listed on their manifests. Trucks break down. Drivers get sick mid-route. Volumes surge, which forces dispatch to overload trucks. And, just to get in on the action, the FedEx system decides to crash every once in a while .
Put simply, deliveries are not for the faint of heart.
But here’s the good news: Beans Route, a FedEx approved routing app, just released a new, game-changing feature to alleviate some of that delivery mayhem: scanning.
However, before we discuss the scanning feature, let’s take a quick detour.
Beans Route, created by One Hundred Feet Inc., is a routing app specifically designed for FedEx AOs, BCs, and drivers. Unlike other routing apps, Beans Route was built from the ground up with the help of ISPs and hundreds of FedEx drivers.
The direct influence of FedEx associates allowed One Hundred Feet to understand the unique needs of the delivery company. In turn, this led One Hundred Feet to what’s never been done before: create groundbreaking data to detail the last one hundred feet of a delivery.
Using sequential waypoints, Beans Route fills in the gap between the “you’ve arrived” notification on GPS and the actual front door of a drop off or pick-up location. Beans Route also highlights locations of parking lots, entrances, package lockers, and other important POIs within apartment complexes.
The precise, unrivaled data Beans Route provides to its users significantly boosts a driver’s stops per hour and reduces driver frustration caused by incomplete navigation. But Beans Route doesn’t stand out just for its impressive data.
As a leading route optimization and dispatch toolkit, Beans Route also provides:
As mentioned earlier, the delivery world faces problems ranging anywhere from overloaded trucks and unscanned packages to broken-down vehicles and an occasional FCC meltdown. These anxiety-ridden scenarios are what inspired One Hundred Feet to add a scanning feature to Beans Route.
The new feature allows drivers to scan packages with their mobile device right inside the Beans Route app. Once a package is scanned, it is automatically added to and optimized with the drivers current route. To help paint a picture of when this feature will be useful, consider the following scenarios.
Created for drivers with overloaded or broken down trucks, rescue routes enlist a second driver to pick up and complete stops on behalf of the first driver. Currently, the rescue process is tedious. The second driver must manually enter the address for each rescued package in order to add the new stops onto their manifest to create a new route. Manual entries also create confusion as rescued packages are not removed from the first driver’s route.
Thankfully, Beans Route’s new scanning feature changes the way drivers create rescue routes. Not only does it eliminate manual entry, thereby saving drivers a significant amount of time and cutting out human-error, it also automatically updates both routes to accurately reflect the handoff.
As many drivers know, when a route ends, it doesn’t always mean an empty truck. Sometimes, FedEx loaders will place a package on a truck without scanning it first. A non-scanned package will not appear in a driver’s manifest nor will the stop be included on the driver’s route.
It’s typically near the end of the day when a driver realizes unscanned packages are present. This results in a driver having to manually enter the address for each unscanned package. The driver must then drive back to neighborhoods they may have already visited earlier in the day to complete the stops.
With the Beans Route scanner, unscanned packages become a little less of a nuisance. By opening the Beans Route app and selecting Scan, drivers can scan multiple packages with a press of a button and allow Beans to form an optimized route.
Although this scenario is less common, the FedEx system is known to crash from time to time. When this happens, drivers’ manifests become unavailable and routes disappear. Until now, the only way to handle this situation was for drivers to either wait for the system to reboot or manually enter the addresses of the remaining packages into their routing software — a complete nightmare.
Thankfully, Beans Route’s scanning feature provides drivers with a third, more effective option. Drivers can now quickly scan whatever remaining packages they have in their trucks straight in the Beans Route app. As packages are scanned, Beans Route recreates manifests and provides optimized routes. By using the high-caliber mapping data Beans Route always supplies, drivers can make up lost time caused from a FFC crash, especially on apartment-heavy routes.
Powerful and game-changing, the new scanning cuts down time to help both drivers and ISPs alike. Key benefits include:
Although the ability to scan has just been released, it is only one of the many new features recently developed for Beans Route. To find out what’s coming next or how Beans Route can work for you, visit the Beans Route website.