Route Optimization
Delivery order shouldn't be decided in the yard each morning.
Build the day's runs against real constraints - time windows, truck capacity, who's driving - then send them to the crew's phones instead of a printed sheet that was wrong before the truck pulled out.
Routing is where a good order goes wrong
The order was right. Inventory was right. Prep was right. Then delivery day arrives and the sequence gets worked out on the loading dock, the driver leaves without the site contact, and a customer calls the office asking where their tables are.
Most rental software treats delivery as a date field. But a delivery has a window, an address that may or may not be the customer's address, a truck that holds a finite amount, and a crew that needs to know what's on board and in what order it comes off.
Build routes against real constraints
Stops carry the constraints that actually determine sequence, so the route reflects the day you're actually running.
- ✓Delivery and pickup time windows per stop
- ✓Truck assignment with capacity taken into account
- ✓Driver and crew assignment
- ✓Waypoints and a reusable waypoint library for sites you serve often
- ✓Automatic stop ordering, with manual override when you know better
Route grouping and stop splitting
Two things break simple routing tools the moment volume picks up.
The first is that a day isn't one route - it's several, run by different crews, that need to be planned together and compared. Route grouping handles the day as a set rather than one run at a time.
The second is that a single order doesn't always leave on a single truck. When an order is too big, or half of it is going out early, stop splitting lets you divide the inventory across stops without duplicating the order or losing track of which items went where.
The crew sees what the office sees
A route that only exists on the dispatcher's screen isn't a route - it's a plan the driver has to be told about.
RentKit's native iOS and Android apps put the run in the driver's hand: stop order, addresses, contacts, what's on the truck, and what comes off at each stop. Load manifests come off the live order, so a change made in the office at 9am is on the phone at 9am.
- ✓Turn-by-turn navigation to the next stop
- ✓Delivery photos and signature capture at the stop
- ✓Live GPS tracking with daily distance and track history
- ✓Customer notifications when a route time changes
A dispatch board for the day
The dispatch board is the single view of what's going out: which routes exist, which trucks are committed, which stops are unassigned, and what still has no home. It's the screen you keep open on delivery mornings.
Where this sits against other rental software
Some rental platforms have no routing at all - Booqable, for one, has no delivery route planning of any kind, which means the whole delivery side of your operation lives outside your rental system.
Others have it but make it hard to use. Event Rental Systems' routing gets described by their own users as overcomplicated. Bouncy Castle Network offers basic planning without optimization.
Where competitors genuinely lead: TapGoods has an RFID partnership for warehouse tracking, and their marketplace generates demand we can't match. If those matter more to you than routing depth, they're a fair choice.
How it works
- 1
Orders with delivery or pickup dates land on the dispatch board for that day.
- 2
Build routes - assign trucks and drivers, set time windows, group related runs, split a stop when one order needs two trucks.
- 3
Optimize stop order, then override anything you know better than the algorithm.
- 4
Publish to the crew's phones. Track progress, capture proof, and notify customers when times move.
Why rental companies route inside RentKit
- ✓Fewer mid-route calls to the office for details already on the order
- ✓Delivery windows you can promise because capacity was checked first
- ✓Proof of delivery attached to the order, not in someone's camera roll
- ✓One system for the order and the route, so a change is a change everywhere
- ✓No separate routing subscription to reconcile against your rental data
See routing built for rental deliveries
We'll plan a real delivery day from your operation and you can judge whether the sequence holds up.