FAQ

Questions people actually ask

What the product is, how to get it running in your zone, and what your team can expect from us afterwards — including the questions with awkward answers. If yours isn’t here, ask on WhatsApp — it’s faster than a form.

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The basics Getting set up The driver app Data quality Support Honest limits Request a walkthrough

The basics

RoutePlanner solves the on-time delivery problem for companies that sell direct to retail. Orders arrive every day, and someone has to decide which outlet gets served by which vehicle, in what order, with which driver. That decision is normally made by hand each morning — it takes hours, it depends on one experienced person, and it cannot really account for what each vehicle can carry. The result is vans going out half empty or overloaded, outlets served late or missed entirely, and no way to prove what happened afterwards. RoutePlanner takes the day's orders and does that planning in one click: routes built around where the outlets actually are, loads matched to each vehicle's capacity, staff allocated, and every stop sequenced. Then it tracks the deliveries live and reports how well the vehicles and the people were used.

FMCG companies and their distributors that deliver directly to retail outlets from their own fleet. If you are putting vehicles on the road every morning to serve hundreds or thousands of shops, this is built for exactly that shape of operation.

No. RoutePlanner sits after your order system, not in front of it. You keep taking orders exactly as you do today and export the daily file as usual — we read that file as it is. Nothing is written back, so your existing system stays the source of truth for anything commercial.

Getting set up

Talk to us and we will set the account up for you — you do not install anything. We create your zone, add each distributor under it, load their outlet list and vehicles, and create the logins for the operator and the drivers. Your team's only job is to start using it. We stay with you through the first live days rather than handing over a manual and disappearing.

Three things: a sample of your daily order file, a list of vehicles with what each one can carry, and your outlet master with addresses. That is enough for us to have a distributor planning its first real day. If outlet locations are missing or wrong, we can start without them and fix them from the field as deliveries run.

A distributor with a clean outlet list can plan its first day the same day we set it up. Where it takes longer, it is almost always because outlet locations are missing — and that is worth fixing regardless of whether you use us. The app has a built-in way to correct them as your team is out delivering, so you are not blocked waiting for perfect data.

The driver app

No. It is a progressive web app — it runs inside the phone's browser and installs to the home screen with its own icon, so it looks and opens like a normal app. The important difference is that it does nothing in the background. Location is captured only at the moments that matter — when the driver starts the trip, arrives at a stop, and confirms a delivery — rather than continuously polling GPS all day, which is what actually flattens a battery. There is no background service running when the driver is not using it. A normal delivery day is comfortably within one charge on an ordinary phone.

Neither. There is nothing to download from the Play Store — the driver opens a link once and taps "add to home screen". It works on ordinary Android phones the drivers already carry. Because it is a web app, updates reach everyone automatically; there is never a version to chase or reinstall after a phone is reset.

English, Hindi or Telugu, chosen by the driver. Everything stored in the system stays in English, so your reports read the same regardless of what language was on the screen. Adding another language is a translation file, not a code change.

Data quality

From the field, using the app — this is one of the most useful things in the product. Wrong shop pins are the single biggest cause of bad routing, and they are almost impossible to fix from an office. So the driver or the salesman standing at the shop taps to capture the correct location, with a photo, the phone's GPS accuracy reading, and the mobile number and address if those are wrong too. It lands in a review queue for the operator, who checks it against a map preview and approves or rejects it in one click. On approval the outlet master updates and the stored distances are recalculated automatically. The practical effect is that your outlet data gets more accurate every week that deliveries run, instead of slowly going stale.

It is left out of automatic planning rather than quietly dropped — it appears in a clearly labelled list with the reason, so your operator can still plan it by hand and knows to get it tagged. Nothing disappears silently.

Support

You get one dedicated support person for your zone. Not a ticket queue, not a shared inbox — a named person who knows your zone, your distributors and how you run. They support everyone in the chain: the distributor, the operator planning the trips, the drivers on the road, and the salesmen in the field. If a driver cannot confirm a delivery at a shop counter, that is the same person who picks up. Reaching them is by phone or WhatsApp, in the working language of your team.

Most of it is designed to be fixable by your own people without calling anyone — a stop marked delivered by mistake, a trip closed too early, orders stuck on a vehicle that came back. Each of those has a visible undo in the app. For anything beyond that, your zone support person handles it directly with whoever is affected.

It depends on the number of distributors and whether you host it or we do. Ask on WhatsApp or on the walkthrough call — we would rather quote against your actual shape than publish a number that fits nobody.

Honest limits

It does not touch payments, invoicing or financial reconciliation — your existing system owns all of that. It does not treat shop opening hours as a hard constraint. It does not plan across multiple days. It does not monitor drivers, which was a deliberate choice. And it does not silently change your data: stuck trips and stranded orders are surfaced as a button for a person to press, never fixed in the background overnight.

The app itself loads without signal, but confirming a delivery needs a connection — the record has to be written with its location and timestamp before the stop can close. In practice drivers retry a moment later when signal returns. Full offline queueing is on the roadmap, not in the current version.

It was built for FMCG direct-to-retail distribution and every design decision reflects that — daily order files, fixed retail outlets, weight-bound vehicles, a handful of drivers per distributor. Operations shaped like that fit well whatever the product category. Operations needing appointment windows, cold chain or long-haul routing would need work we have not done.

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