Most operators assume their routes are reasonably optimized. They're usually wrong by about two hours per driver per day — which on a 20-van fleet is 40 driver-hours lost daily, — hundreds of dollars in labor and fuel waste, every single day (at $25/hr driver cost plus fuel, 40 wasted hours across 20 vans costs $600-800 daily).
The problem is rarely the routing software. It's the inputs. Routes optimized for distance rather than traffic patterns, loading sequences that don't match delivery priorities, stop windows set by convention rather than actual customer data. The system runs on assumptions that stopped being accurate months ago.
The fix starts with data, not software. Pull three months of actual completion times versus planned times, by route, by stop. The patterns tell you exactly where the assumptions broke down.