DumpsterBossPro Blog — Dumpster Rental Software

Route Order and Auto-Routing for a Day of Drops, Swaps and Pulls

Roll-off routing is not like delivery routing. A parcel truck carries a hundred stops at once. A roll-off truck usually carries one can, and every pull sends it to the landfill or transfer station before it can do anything else. The order of the day matters more, not less.

Running the Dumpster Dispatch Board by Truck and Day covered the board itself. This guide covers the order of the jobs within each truck's day.

Why Order Matters More in Roll-Off

Every stop on a roll-off route changes what the truck is carrying. Leave the yard with an empty 20 for a delivery and you come back empty. Do a swap and you leave with a full can headed for disposal. Do a pull and the next stop has to be the haul-to site. Get the order wrong and you either drive empty across town or show up to a delivery with nothing on the truck.

That is why route order is more than shortest distance. A good order respects what is on the truck after each stop, where the disposal site is, and when the customer needs the can.

Setting the Order by Hand

In DumpsterBossPro, each truck's jobs on the dispatch board are in route order, and you can set that order yourself. Drag the contractor's swap to first because his crew starts at seven. Put the delivery near the yard last so the truck ends the day close to home.

Hand ordering is where experience counts. You know the landfill line is long after ten. You know the school zone on the way to one site jams up at three. You know which customer will not be home before noon. None of that is on a map, but all of it can be reflected in the order.

Write the constraints down where everyone can see them. A note on the job that says "must be before 8 a.m., crew starts at 8" or "customer home after 1 p.m. only" turns knowledge in the dispatcher's head into something the next person building routes can use.

Using Auto-Routing

When you have a lot of stops and no special constraints, auto-routing can put each truck's stops in a sensible sequence for you. It is a fast way to get a reasonable first draft of the day, especially when the office is building tomorrow's routes at the end of a long afternoon.

The best use of auto-routing is as a starting point. Run it, then look at the result with the roll-off logic in mind. Does a pull come right before a delivery that needs the empty? Is there a time window that got shuffled? Adjust a stop or two by hand and you have a route that is both efficient and realistic.

Planning Around the Haul-To

Every pull, swap and dump and return has a haul-to address on the job, the landfill or transfer station the load is going to. When you order a route, think about the truck's path through those facilities. Two pulls that both go to the same transfer station work well back to back. A pull that goes to a concrete recycler on the far side of the county might be best saved for the end of the day.

The driver has both addresses in the app with one-tap navigation, so he can move from site to disposal to next site without stopping to look anything up.

When the Day Changes

Routes change mid-day. A customer is not ready. A gate is locked. A new swap comes in. When something changes, adjust the order on the board and the driver's app reflects it. If a job cannot be done, move it to another day rather than leaving it sitting on today's route.

Encourage drivers to tell the office early when something will throw off the route, and to use the job notes so the reason is on record. A pull that did not happen because the can was blocked is a very different conversation with the customer than one that was simply missed.

Measuring Whether It Works

A good route shows up in fewer trips back to the yard, shorter days and more jobs per truck. Look at your reports over a few weeks. If one truck consistently does fewer jobs in the same hours, look at its routes. Often the problem is order, not the driver.

The next guide covers the job types that make up a roll-off day and how to set each one up. To see how routing connects to dispatch and billing, visit the DumpsterBossPro dumpster rental software page.