Against a backdrop of rising fuel prices and driver shortages, transport and logistics companies face constant pressure to reduce costs. Soaring customer expectations and shrinking margins make it essential to deliver goods faster, cheaper, and more reliably.
In this situation, it can be tempting to hire more route planning and dispatch staff to ease the strain, often making dispatch one of your largest operational cost centres.
However, the process of manually planning routes and managing drivers may be draining potential profit by wasting fuel, increasing driver overtime, and causing preventable errors.
In fact, when manual route planning takes twice as long and uses 12% more fuel than automated solutions, your current processes could be eroding margins and restricting growth far more than you think.
the true cost of manual planning
Across the logistics industry, escalating costs continue to squeeze margins, which remain wafer-thin at around 2%. Reasons for this squeeze include:
- Geopolitical instability
- Volatile global fuel prices
- Driver shortages and increased wage pressure
- Inflation on parts and maintenance
- Environmental regulations and penalties
For dispatchers, this combination of macro forces and daily operational pressures heightens the need to minimise mileage and hit on‑time delivery targets. Yet, in a chaotic manual planning environment, it is impossible to reliably calculate the most efficient route in real time.
Costs can escalate in the following ways:
Fuel costs: Even highly skilled dispatch teams will, at times, create inefficient routes, leading to wasted miles, higher fuel consumption, and increased emissions.
Labour costs: Poor routes and constant schedule changes frustrate drivers, leading to higher turnover at a time when recruiting, training, and retaining drivers is increasingly difficult.
Dispatch costs: A high‑stress manual planning environment, where staff must juggle variables and manage daily delays by phone, creates operational inefficiency and increases dispatcher burnout.
Your dispatch team’s biggest challenge is not their skill or even your headcount. The real issue is that only automation can manage complex route planning at scale, enabling you to control costs and unlock hidden savings across fuel and labour.
how automation drives profit
Today’s transport management system (TMS) completes the planning puzzle by helping your dispatch team automate route planning, order scheduling, driver hours, and maintenance – all in a single system.
It instantly processes thousands of data points to build the most efficient route, accounting for factors such as truck type, delivery windows, traffic patterns, and tolls. Utilizing this type of intelligent automation ensures the dispatch and delivery process drives profit by:
Cutting fuel spend
Enhanced route planning and real‑time optimisation enable dispatchers to reduce fuel costs. Efficient routing minimises mileage, cuts idle time, and reduces overall spend. Since fuel accounts for roughly one‑third of industry costs, even small efficiencies can significantly improve profit margins.
Increasing dispatch productivity
Data analysis and AI‑powered automation help dispatch staff make informed choices, simplifying route and load optimisation. One dispatcher can manage more drivers and more routes with less stress. Automation cuts waste, not headcount, allowing teams to focus on strategic work rather than firefighting.
Reducing driver stress
Efficient, automatically updated routes mean drivers avoid unnecessary delays. Businesses can deliver faster without increasing pressure on drivers. More even workloads support predictable schedules and reduce stress. With more than 426,000 truck driver positions unfilled in the EU, automation helps companies attract and retain drivers.
understanding the hidden ROI of automated dispatch
Switching to automated route planning and dispatch delivers an impressive return on investment (ROI), with research indicating that a TMS can cut overall transport costs by up to 15%.
Most companies benefit from both direct savings—such as reduced mileage and lower fuel spend—and indirect improvements, including better customer satisfaction and higher on‑time delivery rates, with a typical increase of around 20%.
a logistics leader's guide to protecting margins
For a full breakdown of the tangible results you can expect, check out our playbook: A Logistics Leader's Guide to Protecting Margins. It unpacks how to regain operational control and boost business resilience in volatile times. You’ll find practical ways to measure return on investment (ROI), plus actionable advice on how to add value through automation.
Streamlining route building, dispatch, and exception handling also helps teams reduce stress and respond faster. Since manual planning is often a source of errors, automation offers clear advantages: you can plan better and work faster, potentially cutting route planning time by around 50%.
from cost centre to profit engine
Transforming your dispatch and planning function from a cost centre into a reliable profit engine is essential in today’s market, where margins are razor‑thin and volatility is increasing.
The journey begins by equipping your team with the right tools. At AMCS, we’re ready to help you accelerate your productivity a TMS that turns daily chaos into predictable profit. Contact us today to find out how we can help.