Route Planning Overload? How Routing as a Service (RaaS) Cuts Miles and Fuel Costs

Mike from dispatch just quit. He took with him the only brain that understood how your routing actually worked, leaving behind a laptop full of spreadsheets nobody can decode. Now you’re watching your operations manager try to figure out why yesterday’s routes had three trucks delivering to the same street hours apart.

Situations like this get expensive fast. Trucks driving extra miles because nobody caught the overlap. Fuel costs creeping up every week. Drivers hitting overtime because their routes look like someone threw darts at a map. 

You know better routing would fix this, but the software vendors want six figures and your IT department is already buried.

Routing as a Service sidesteps all that, and at NT Logistics, we built RaaS+ for companies stuck right where you are.

How Routing as a Service (RaaS) Turns Waste Into Profit

We’ve run the numbers on hundreds of fleets, and the pattern never changes: Companies leave serious money on the table through inefficient routing — not because anyone’s incompetent, but because routing complexity scales faster than your ability to manage it manually. The good news is that fixing routing creates immediate wins across three areas that directly impact your operation’s profitability.

Fewer Miles, Lower Operating Cost

We know what each mile actually costs you because the numbers are brutal. Between fuel at 48 cents per mile, maintenance at 20 cents, and tires at 5 cents, you’re spending 73 cents in variable costs alone before counting driver time or equipment depreciation. The full cost runs $2.26 per mile when everything gets factored in.

Our RaaS+ service attacks mileage systematically. One distributor watched a daily run shrink from 107 miles to 87 just through smarter sequencing. Another documented cuts between 14% and 27% across different route types. Industrywide, the conservative average sits around 9%, which translates to 9,000 fewer miles per truck annually if you’re running typical 100,000-mile years. Run the math on your own fleet: 9,000 miles times 73 cents equals $6,525 saved per truck on variable costs alone.

Less Deadhead, Better Utilization

Empty miles kill profitability quietly. Industry data shows trucks run empty 16.7% of the time, burning fuel and racking up maintenance costs while generating nothing. Your fleet probably mirrors this waste right now.

Our routing desk connects the dots differently. We string deliveries into continuous moves, keeping trucks loaded through the day instead of ping-ponging between customers with empty trailers. Reducing empty miles from 16.7% to 13.7% eliminates 3,000 deadhead miles per truck yearly. Those aren’t theoretical miles — they’re real gallons of diesel you stop buying next month.

The magic happens because our team stays involved all day. When your biggest customer suddenly needs a delivery pushed back three hours, we adjust the surrounding routes to maintain efficiency. Pure software would just blow everything up and start over, but our planners know which dominoes can fall and which ones need to stay standing.

Lower Fuel and Emissions

Fuel savings tell only half the story. Each gallon of diesel burned releases 10.19 kilograms of CO₂. Most fleets average around 7 miles per gallon, meaning every mile produces roughly 1.4 kilograms of emissions. Cut 9,000 miles annually per truck, and you’ve prevented 13.3 metric tons of CO₂ from entering the atmosphere per vehicle.

Food and beverage fleets see amplified benefits. Refrigerated trucks burn extra fuel keeping products cold during unnecessary stops and extended routes, but we consolidate multi-stop loads intelligently to maximize weight per trip while minimizing temperature-sensitive dwell time. Fewer stops, tighter routes, and heavier loads per trip all compound into dramatic fuel reductions.

The measurement piece matters because vague promises about sustainability don’t fly anymore. We build tracking directly into RaaS+, documenting exactly how many miles disappeared, how much fuel stayed in the tank, and what that meant for emissions. You get real numbers for real reductions, not estimates based on industry averages or aspirations. 

Five Ways RaaS+ Boosts Profit on Every Route

You’ve seen the big picture savings. Now let’s get specific about how we actually pull this off every single day. Our Routing as a Service approach hits your operation from five angles simultaneously, each one designed to extract waste that’s been hiding in your network for years.  

• Smart Stop Sequencing That Drivers Follow: We pair human planners with optimization software to reorder your stops within existing delivery windows and turn chaotic routes into logical progressions. Our planners know which loading docks stay locked until midmorning and which customers lose their minds about afternoon deliveries, so the routes we build work in the real world instead of just on paper.
• Real-Time Exception Handling Without the Panic: Our routing desk manages your morning plan, then adapts throughout the day when customers change delivery windows or drivers hit traffic. Unlike pure software that rebuilds everything from scratch every time something changes, we make surgical adjustments that keep the rest of your routes intact and your drivers on schedule.
• Continuous Moves That Eliminate Empty Running: We chain your loads together so trucks stop leaving docks empty, attacking that 16.7% deadhead average plaguing the industry. Our Network Studies identify exactly where to connect deliveries with pickups, when to use private fleet versus common carrier, and how to rebalance territories so trucks stay loaded and productive.
• Load Consolidation That Reduces Total Truck Count: For multi-stop operations, especially for refrigerated food and beverage, we build heavier, better-sequenced loads that maximize each trailer’s capacity. One client reduced its fleet from 151 to 130 units while still hitting all delivery windows, because we figured out how to combine the LTL shipments into efficient multi-stop truckloads.
• Cost Transparency That Drives Smarter Decisions: Our NTelligence platform exposes the true cost to serve each customer and lane, revealing expensive inefficiencies you never knew existed. We helped a medical supply network cut miles by 11% and save over $2 million annually just by showing them which delivery frequencies and consolidation points were bleeding money, then fixing them.

Your Routes Are Costing You More Than They Should

Every routing inefficiency you tolerate today becomes a line item tomorrow. That driver who just backtracked 20 miles because the route made no geographical sense. The refrigerated truck sitting in traffic with three more stops to hit before the depot closes. The two trucks that delivered to the same street an hour apart because nobody noticed the overlap. These scenarios play out daily across your fleet, burning money while everyone pretends it’s just the cost of doing business. Spreadsheets and gut instinct worked when you had five trucks. Now they’re costing you thousands a week.

We built RaaS+ to solve exactly what you’re dealing with. Our team takes over your daily routing completely, using optimization tools we already mastered, plus human judgment to handle real-world logistics. Your dispatchers get their mornings back. Drivers stop arguing about route logic. Fuel costs drop because trucks run smarter patterns instead of zigzagging across town. And the whole operation works better, starting the first week we take over. 

Contact NT Logistics and let us analyze your current routes. We’ll show you exactly where the money’s hiding and how fast we can get it back in your pocket.