How planning works
What happens when you press Plan routes.
No black box. Kerbel plans in five steps that a dispatcher would recognise, and it shows you what each one changed.
Step 01
Sweep the drops into vans
Kerbel sorts every drop by its bearing from the depot and cuts the circle into one slice per van, balanced by parcels and driving time. Neighbouring streets end up in the same van.
Step 02
Put each run in order
Inside each van it starts with the nearest drop, then keeps untangling the route: wherever two legs cross, it reverses the stretch between them, until no change makes the run shorter.
Step 03
Keep every time window
Any drop can carry a window, such as before 9:30 or between 9 and 12. The planner treats a late minute as far worse than an extra mile, so a slightly longer run that arrives on time wins.
Step 04
Balance the whole fleet
Drops then move between vans whenever that shortens the whole day or brings the last van home sooner, not only when it helps one van.
Step 05
Re-plan as the day changes
Drag a drop, add one or change the number of vans and Kerbel starts from the current plan instead of from scratch. Drivers keep the stops they already have, and the new plan is ready in under a second.
To plan your first run
You need three things.
Your drops: a spreadsheet, your online shop or the API
Your vans, their capacity and your depot address
About ten minutes before the first run
About our numbers
Every saving we show names what it is compared with.
The baseline is a hand plan: the same drops split into zones and driven in the order the requests came in. It is how most small fleets plan without software. If you already use a planner, your saving will be smaller, and the free trial on your own drops will tell you by how much.