Delivery route planner
A real delivery run in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban. Put the stops in any order you like — then watch the optimiser find the route a dispatcher can’t.
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Distances, drive times and road geometry precomputed on ParcelOps’ own South African road-network routing engine — the same one that plans real courier runs.
Johannesburg run (8 stops)
depot to depot- 1Sandton CitySandton
- 2East Rand MallBoksburg
- 3Rosebank MallRosebank
- 4Festival MallKempton Park
- 5Maponya MallSoweto
- 6Fourways MallFourways
- 7Alberton City MallAlberton
- 8Cresta Shopping CentreRandburg
Add a stop
How runs really get driven — pick one, then optimise
driven in the order the bookings came in
Booking order
There’s a faster way to drive these 8 stops — hit Optimise route to see it.
Why the “obvious” order is usually wrong
Stops arrive in booking order, and that’s the order most runs get driven in. But 8 stops can be sequenced 40,320 ways and 11 stops nearly 40 million ways — and on a real road network the nearest-looking stop is often the wrong next stop, because highways, one-way systems and river crossings don’t care about straight lines. The gap between a booking-order route and the optimal one is typically 15–30% of the day’s driving — recovered fuel, hours and delivery capacity, every day, on every vehicle.
How this demo works — and why you can trust its numbers
- Real road data. Every drive time, distance and route line was computed on ParcelOps’ own routing engine running the actual South African road network — the same engine that plans production courier runs.
- Proven optimality. The optimiser solves the route exactly — and its answers are verified against brute-force enumeration of every possible driving order, for every stop selection this page can produce. Not “a good route”: the best one.
- Direction matters. The engine stores A→B and B→A separately, because on real one-way systems they differ — a detail straight-line planners can’t see.
The full ParcelOps platform runs this at operational scale: your own delivery addresses, multiple vehicles and capacities, time windows, and optimised trip sheets pushed straight to each driver’s phone.
Route optimisation FAQs
What is delivery route optimisation?
Route optimisation finds the order of stops that minimises total driving time or distance for a delivery run. On a typical multi-stop courier route, the difference between the order stops were booked in and the optimal order is commonly 15–30% of the day's driving — fuel, hours and vehicle wear saved without changing anything else.
Why is ordering delivery stops so hard to do by hand?
Because the number of possible orders explodes: 8 stops can be driven in 40,320 different sequences, 11 stops in almost 40 million. Human planners also tend to judge by straight-line distance, but real road networks — highways, one-ways, township road layouts — make the closest-looking stop frequently the wrong next stop.
Does this planner use real road distances?
Yes. Every drive time, distance and route line in this demo is computed on ParcelOps' own routing engine running the actual South African road network — not straight-line estimates. That is why a route can look longer on the map yet be faster to drive: the engine knows where the highways are.
Is the optimised route actually the best one, or just a good guess?
For this demo, it is the proven optimum. With up to 11 stops the optimiser can check every possibility exactly, and its results are verified against exhaustive enumeration for every stop selection the page offers. Production systems handling hundreds of stops use advanced solvers that get within a fraction of optimal while adding real-world constraints.
What does a full route optimisation system add over this demo?
Your own addresses at any scale, multiple vehicles with capacities, delivery time windows, driver shifts, and live re-optimisation when the day changes — plus the route feeding straight into driver navigation and proof-of-delivery. This demo shows the core idea; a courier operation runs it on every vehicle, every morning.
Now imagine this on every vehicle, every morning
ParcelOps optimises your real runs — your addresses, your fleet, your time windows — and sends each driver an optimised trip sheet.