Local delivery management platform Loop is proud to bring its new API services for route planning and route optimisation to market, seeking to help clients in logistics and delivery operations to enhance efficiency and reduce operational costs.
The new Routing APIs are designed to streamline delivery operations, reduce costs, and improve overall efficiency. The solutions are affordable, flexible and easy to integrate into existing systems.
Loop’s Routing APIs are developed in-house and boasts the kind of agility that makes it suitable for use in diverse enterprises. “We’re particularly proud of the fact that our route planning and route optimisation solutions are adaptable as this allows us to easily tailor the algorithms to meet the unique constraints and requirements of clients across sectors, which means it can have a measurable impact on the efficiencies of an organisation and its specific challenges,” says Nadine Jack, Head of Product and Engineering at Loop.
Adaptability, in particular, is a central feature of the solutions. “A big part of our goal with this API was to ensure seamless integration with existing delivery management, transport management or fleet management systems. Efficiency is at the heart of what we’ve built and that efficiency needs to translate into the ease with which clients can integrate it into existing systems,” she says.
The route planning API works, simply, to create optimal batches of orders for the individual drivers in a fleet, ensuring balanced workloads and adherence to operational limitations. For example, a company with 10,000 parcels to deliver might need to distribute these among 100 drivers. This process considers various parameters, including parcel destinations, weights, and constraints such as the maximum number of stops a driver can make in a day.
Similarly, the route optimisation API focuses on determining the most efficient sequence for a driver to complete their assigned stops. The primary goal is to minimise driving distance and time, thereby reducing fuel consumption and enhancing overall productivity, which is achieved with the help of algorithms that calculate the shortest or fastest possible path that accounts for factors like distance, traffic conditions, and delivery time window.
“This is internal intelligence that we built and tested with clients in the real world and the response has been very positive. It’s built such that we can easily tweak it to meet specific business needs, which is a big part of the efficiency,” explains Percival Phakathi, Senior Data Scientist at Loop.
Phakathi emphasises the distinction between business knowledge and business intelligence, the former being what the people know about the business and the latter what the algorithm can offer in terms of data and insights. “The algorithm we created provides business intelligence. When that intelligence is married with business knowledge in a strategic and efficient way, it has the potential to have a major impact on the efficiency of a business through optimisations. That’s at the centre of this API,” he says.
Even enterprises with pre-existing systems that lack advanced routing algorithms, Loop’s API provides a straightforward solution. Businesses can input their order data into the system and receive optimised routing plans in response. Additionally, for companies with their own driver applications, the API enables real-time route optimisation. Drivers can initiate an API call at the start of their day to receive the most efficient sequence for their deliveries, enhancing operational efficiency and service quality.
The launch of these Routing APIs is yet another demonstration of Loop’s commitment to innovation in logistics. This proprietary technology has the potential to empower businesses in the sector to enhance and optimise operations in line with real business needs.
