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Most route drivers welcome tools and techniques that improve their productivity. Higher productivity enables drivers to make the same amount of money in less time or, if they are paid on commission, more money in the same amount of time. Fortunately, techniques exist that enable drivers to do this, with and without new technology.

A central component of improving route productivity is to reduce the amount of inventory on the truck. There are two basic ways to accomplish this without running out of products: 1) Carry fewer individual products (known as SKUs), and 2) Load the truck with less of each SKU.

Another technique is to make only one trip from the truck to the machine. This can be done by eliminating the "counting" or "correction" trip. We will consider these and other time savings options in this article.

If you are like most drivers, you either load your own truck, or order what needs to be loaded by filling out a sheet a few days in advance, or "calling in the order." The challenge is to keep track of what accounts you are visiting the next day and order the appropriate products. The safest thing to do is often to load extra product so you won't run out.

The problem many drivers have is they leave the warehouse every morning with two to three times the amount of product they will need that day. In addition to making the job more tedious because of fumbling around in the back of the truck, the excess product guarantees that they will end up with more damaged and spoiled product at the end of the day. And finally, if the company keeps a running truck inventory, the entire inventory process takes longer when more products are involved.

Consider ways to reduce truck inventory
How can you reduce the amount of truck inventory? There are several ways.

If your company uses some sort of planogram, stick to it. Obviously, some accounts are going to require special products, but generally, drivers can reduce the number of different SKUs being loaded on the truck without compromising customer needs by sticking to the company planogram.

The next step is to figure out how much of each product to load on the truck. Without technology, the easiest way to "forecast" the amount of products is to keep a route book (or log) that has a past history of product sold (or filled) in each machine.