Five stops can run in 120 orders. One is 18.5% shorter.

A worked example close to home: one truck leaves Frisco, makes five deliveries around Dallas and comes back. We kept the same stops and changed only the order.

Origin: Frisco, Texas
Stops: Five
Possible orders: 120
Saved: 19.8 miles, 18.5%

Aerial view of North Texas suburbs with two delivery loops drawn between the same five stops

The order as listed

Leg	To	Miles
1	Teel Pkwy, Frisco	4.8
2	Hedgcoxe Rd, Plano	10.2
3	Belle Grove Dr, Richardson	14.0
4	Airport Pkwy, Addison	10.0
5	S Goliad St, Rockwall	31.3
Return	Stonebrook Pkwy, Frisco	36.6
Total		106.9

The same five stops, reordered

Leg	To	Miles
1	Hedgcoxe Rd, Plano	6.0
2	Belle Grove Dr, Richardson	14.0
3	S Goliad St, Rockwall	20.4
4	Airport Pkwy, Addison	26.3
5	Teel Pkwy, Frisco	15.5
Return	Stonebrook Pkwy, Frisco	4.9
Total		87.1

That’s 19.8 fewer miles for one truck on one day. Across a fleet over a year, those miles show up in fuel, maintenance and driver hours.

Why nobody does this by hand

Five stops can be run in 120 different orders. Ten stops can be run 3.6 million ways. A fifteen-stop route, which is an ordinary day for a lot of delivery fleets, has more than a trillion. Average speed, dwell time at each dock, traffic patterns and the size of the service area all change which one is best. That’s a job for routing software, with someone who knows the roads checking that the answer can actually be driven.

What each stop is worth

Put a $100 sale on each stop and price the time and miles to reach it, and one of the five stops costs more than it earns.

Stop	Sale	Cost to serve	Margin
Plano	$100	$34.68	$65.32
Richardson	$100	$28.97	$71.03
Rockwall	$100	$201.12	−$101.12
Addison	$100	$55.22	$44.78
Frisco	$100	$28.41	$71.59

Once you know that number, you can talk about a minimum order or a delivery charge for Rockwall.

The full paper this example comes from: Navigating Excellence →

Two minutes See where savings may be hiding Seven questions, no email, and a dollar range with the places we’d look first. On real freight See it on a real fleet Eighteen box trucks, four weeks of routes, and what reordering the stops was worth.