Small Route Improvements Can Add Up to Serious Savings

One of the easiest routing mistakes to make is assuming there is nothing left to optimize.

Your planners know the operation. Your drivers know the territory. The routes may already look efficient, and the work gets done. But “efficient” and “fully optimized” are not necessarily the same thing. And when margins are tight and operating costs keep rising, even a few percentage points of overlooked efficiency can have an outsized effect on the bottom line. Those savings matter because they come from improving the work you are already doing, rather than relying on more customers, more volume, or more revenue to improve profitability.

That makes one question worth asking: How sure are you that there is no more efficiency left in your routes?

For George’s Inc., a food distributor serving more than 250 restaurants, the improvement in road miles was just 5%. But the impact went well beyond mileage. The company reported $31,000 in annual fuel savings, reduced the number of vehicles required by 10% while maintaining service levels, and eliminated six hours of administrative work every week.

George’s operates 42 company-owned trucks, so a 10% fleet reduction represents roughly four vehicles. That creates additional value beyond fuel savings by reducing the amount of equipment required to complete the same work while maintaining service levels. The six hours of administrative time saved each week also add up to 312 hours per year. At a 2025 U.S. median dispatcher wage of $24.20 per hour, that represents about $7,550 in annual labor value. Together, the reported fuel savings and estimated labor value represent roughly $38,550 per year, before considering the additional financial value of operating with a smaller fleet.

This is only one example of where those savings can appear.

Better routing can affect technician and driver time, overtime, delivery productivity, vehicle utilization, maintenance exposure, and even how many vehicles are needed to complete the work. That is what makes small routing improvements worth investigating. You do not need to believe your operation is badly inefficient for a closer look to uncover meaningful savings.

The examples below show what relatively small improvements can mean in real dollars across different types of fleet operations.

A Small Percentage Improvement Can Show Up in Different Ways

What would finding just 5% more efficiency actually be worth? The answer depends on the operation. A 5% improvement does not create the same type of value for every fleet, but using the same lens makes it easier to see how quickly those gains can turn into real dollars. For a field-service organization, one of the biggest opportunities is often technician time.

Cardata’s field-service research found technicians averaging approximately 1,106 business miles per month, showing how much travel can accumulate across a mobile workforce. Consider an illustrative 50-technician operation where each technician costs the business $50 per hour fully loaded and spends two hours per day travelling between jobs across 250 working days per year. That represents roughly $1.25 million per year in technician travel time. A 5% reduction in travel time would represent approximately $62,500 per year in technician-time value.And that level of improvement is not unrealistic. A real-world telecommunications field-service study found that optimized technician routing reduced travel time by approximately 16%. Applied to the same illustrative 50-technician example, that would represent approximately $200,000 per year in technician-time value.

Better routing may also create room for additional appointments or reduce overtime, adding further value beyond travel time.

For last-mile delivery, the same 5% improvement can play out across thousands of individual deliveries.

BCG’s 2026 parcel-logistics research found that last-mile delivery accounts for approximately 50% to 60% of total parcel-delivery cost, while more than one in seven carriers reported average delivery costs above $5 per parcel. Using that $5-per-delivery benchmark, an operation completing 100,000 deliveries represents at least $500,000 in delivery cost. Five percent of that cost base represents approximately $25,000 in annual delivery-cost value.  The opportunity becomes larger as delivery volume grows. At 500,000 deliveries, the same benchmark represents $2.5 million in delivery cost, meaning 5% of that cost base represents approximately $125,000.

And there is plenty of pressure to find those efficiencies. FarEye’s 2025 U.S. last-mile research found that average delivery costs increased by approximately 12% from 2024 to 2025, with route inefficiencies, fuel use, driver hours, and vehicle wear among the factors affecting delivery costs.

For passenger transportation, the dollar impact can be even more visible because operating costs accumulate across every vehicle mile.

In 2024, Sacramento-based Paratransit, Inc. reported approximately 464,000 annual demand-response vehicle revenue miles and $2.94 million in annual demand-response operating expenses, equivalent to $6.34 per vehicle revenue mile. Five percent of that annual operating cost base is approximately $147,000. That does not mean a 5% route improvement automatically produces $147,000 in cash savings. Passenger fleets still need to meet pickup requirements, schedules, capacity limits, and service commitments, while some costs will remain fixed.

But it shows the financial scale involved. If better routing can reduce avoidable mileage, driver time, or vehicle requirements while maintaining the same level of service, even a relatively small percentage improvement can touch a substantial amount of annual operating spend.

Sometimes the Bigger Saving Is the Vehicle You No Longer Need

Reducing mileage and operating cost is valuable. But sometimes better routing can create a much bigger opportunity. What if the same workload can reliably be completed with one fewer active vehicle? The economics can change considerably.

Instead of only reducing fuel and mileage-related expenses, a business may be able to avoid or defer costs associated with acquiring, leasing, maintaining, insuring, parking, or eventually replacing another vehicle. But that cannot be determined by mileage alone. The work still has to fit. Customer time windows need to be met. Vehicles have capacity limits. Drivers have shifts. Some jobs require particular skills or vehicle capabilities.

This is where route optimization software can help test what is actually possible. Scheduled Routes, for example, includes a Minimize Vehicles Used strategy that can be used to evaluate whether the same workload can be completed with fewer active vehicles while accounting for those operational constraints.

So the bigger question is not simply: “Can we drive fewer miles?”

It is: “Can we complete the same work with fewer miles, less time, or fewer vehicles?”

Small Percentage Improvements. Big Impact.

Even fleets that already run efficiently can still have meaningful savings left to uncover.

George’s found meaningful savings from just a 5% reduction in road miles. Across the other examples in this article, relatively small changes in technician travel, delivery costs, mileage, or vehicle requirements can quickly translate into tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars when repeated across an entire operation. And those savings matter because they do not require selling another product, winning another customer, or adding more work. When routing improvements reduce operating expense while maintaining the same service level, more of the revenue the business is already generating can make its way to the bottom line.

That is why assuming the routes are already “good enough” can be expensive. The only reliable way to know how much opportunity remains is to test the operation against a more optimized plan. Finding those gains manually is difficult. Planners are balancing stops, time windows, vehicle capacities, shifts, required skills, service commitments, and daily changes simultaneously. A route that looks efficient to a person may still contain combinations and trade-offs that are extremely difficult to uncover by hand.

This is where an advanced route optimization solution like Scheduled Routes can help. Rather than simply creating shorter routes, Scheduled Routes evaluates the operational constraints behind the work and can test different optimization strategies, including whether the same workload can be completed with fewer miles, less time, or fewer vehicles.

That deeper optimization matters. Scheduled Routes is designed to improve fleet efficiency by up to 20% and reduce total fleet mileage by up to 30%. Not every operation will uncover improvements of that size. Some may already be highly efficient. Others may discover that considerably more opportunity was hiding inside their existing routes than they expected.

The important thing is to find out. How much could better route planning actually save across your fleet?

Contact Scheduled Routes for a quick routing-efficiency consultation and get an estimate of where additional optimization could create measurable savings across your operation.