Route4Me

Carter, a leading provider of logistics solutions in South Africa, began as a ride-hailing startup in 2020. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the demand for people-moving services declined as residents stayed home instead of shopping at brick-and-mortar stores. Recognizing an opportunity in the delivery logistics industry, Carter decided to pivot from people to packages. As the company grew, the need for efficient route planning became evident. Their in-house route planning algorithm could only handle up to 10 stops and required more computational resources on their servers than they had anticipated. This led Carter to seek a specialized solution for their route planning needs.

The University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) faced several challenges in delivering pharmaceuticals to 8 major hospitals and the surrounding residential region of Rochester, NY. The large service area and critical stop requirements made manual route planning time-consuming and inefficient. The situation was further complicated by the short shelf-life of many drugs, including chemotherapy drugs, which needed to be delivered to other facilities without expiring. Any delay in delivery could have serious implications for quality of care and patient outcomes. Additionally, as the number of stops per route increased, the complexity of the route also increased exponentially, making it harder to create efficient routes. Previous attempts to use other routing solutions from big name carriers to smaller providers proved unsuccessful as they were unable to handle the number of stops or factor in the necessary routing constraints.