10 reasons why your job as a planner is stressful

Written by: Kendra

As planner in logistics, you are responsible for ensuring that all deliveries run smoothly on a daily basis. Yet problems seem to pile up all the time. This makes your job not only challenging, but also very stressful. Which of the following situations do you recognise yourself in?

1. Manually plan the most efficient routes

It is your responsibility to plan routes as efficiently as possible every day, but it takes a huge amount of time. Manually calculating the fastest route, taking into account delivery locations, traffic density, and customer opening hours, can be overwhelming. No wonder you run into the same challenges every day.

2. Keeping an overview in papers and spreadsheets

Managing routes using paper and Excel sheets may sound simple, but in practice, you quickly lose track. A mistake here, a change there, and suddenly you seem to be in the middle of a paper chaos. So how do you still keep control?

3. Calling drivers with questions

You're busy enough, but then the phone rings. A driver calls because he is missing important information about his route. Maybe he doesn't know exactly where to go, leaving you to search through your stack of papers or the instructions are unclear. Every time, this costs you precious time you could have used otherwise.

4. Sudden changes disrupt your planning

When your planning finally seems to be on track, a last-minute change comes in. A customer changes his delivery time, a rush order needs to be added or a driver drops out. These unexpected changes throw your entire planning into disarray and cause extra stress.

5. Traffic jams and road closures disrupt schedules

Traffic jams, traffic jams and unexpected road closures are unfortunately unavoidable. This causes drivers to be unable to stick to their planned route and time slots, and your carefully constructed schedule quickly falls apart.

6. Angry customers call with questions about their order

While you're trying to keep everything on track, the phone rings again. This time it is a customer who is angry because his order has not yet arrived. ‘Where is it?’ reads the question. Increasingly, you get this question, but because you don't have a (live) location of your drivers, you can't answer it so 123. You will first have to contact your driver or give an estimate. Whatever you do, the question creates extra pressure and frustration.

7. Poor organisation of freight costs time

You have the routes well thought out, but the freight is not organised in the right way. This means drivers lose valuable time during loading and unloading. Which in turn affects delivery times. And so the pressure keeps mounting.

8. Delivery drivers arrive late due to inefficient route planning

Variables such as loading and unloading times are not taken into account by your current route planner, which means deliverers are more likely to arrive late. As a result, delays accumulate throughout the day, creating a domino effect that affects all deliveries.

9. Lost time and fuel due to inefficient routes

Nothing is more frustrating than a route planner that sends your drivers through inefficient or even bizarre routes. This not only leads to lost time, but also wasted fuel, costing the company money. How much more efficient would it be if you could optimise these routes?

10. Too many tasks and not enough time

With all these challenges, you are sometimes at a loss for words. The number of tasks combined with a shortage of time creates constant pressure and stress for planners. Deadlines get harder and harder to meet and you wonder how long you can keep this up. Maybe you even doubt whether you still like the job enough.

Based on these 10 challenges, we can conclude that the work of a logistics planner is challenging. In addition, the list of stress factors is long. But by embracing automation and smart software solutions, many of these problems can be reduced or even prevented. Reducing stress starts with optimising your work processes