How to organize water delivery routes: visit days, stop order and truck loading

To organize water delivery routes, group your customers by zone, give each zone fixed visit days, order the stops on a map so you never double back, and load the truck with the day's orders plus what that route usually sells without an order. With fixed routes the driver already knows what each day holds, customers know when you come by, and the office stops building the route from scratch every morning. Everything else is fine-tuning based on what each route's numbers tell you.

A note on terms: in Mexico the 20-liter returnable water jug is called a garrafón, and aguas frescas are sweetened fruit or flower drinks sold in bags or bottles. We keep both words below.

Fixed routes by day of the week

The most stable way to deliver purified water or aguas frescas is the fixed route: a named run, such as "North Route", visited on certain weekdays with a default truck and driver.

For example:

• North Route: Monday and Thursday.
• Downtown Route: Tuesday and Friday.
• South Route: Wednesday and Saturday.

Within each route, not every stop has to be visited every day. A large store may need a visit on both route days, and a household only on one. What matters is that each stop has its own days recorded, so the day's list builds itself.

Special orders, such as a weekend event or a school ordering extra, are added to the route of the matching day as an additional stop. Nothing has to be rebuilt.

Why they beat improvising every day

• Customers know which day you come by and have their empties ready.
• Drivers know their streets, their customers and their schedules.
• You can compare a route against itself week after week.
• Truck loading becomes predictable.

Group your customers by zone

Before drawing routes, you need all your customers on a map. If you do not have their locations, start there: the driver can save the location with the phone's GPS on the next visit.

With the map in front of you, group customers into zones using practical criteria:

• Neighboring areas that can be covered without crossing big avenues at rush hour.
• Natural barriers: rivers, railroad tracks, highways, hills.
• Volume: everything delivered in the zone has to fit in one truck.
• Time: the route has to fit in the driver's workday, with room for the unexpected.

A zone that looks small on the map can be huge in work if it has many stores that buy a lot. Balance routes by workload, not by kilometers.

Order the stops with the map

Once you know which customers belong to each route, you need the order. A good order saves gas and time, and means customers get their water at roughly the same time every week.

A few rules that work:

1. Leave the plant toward the farthest point and come back covering the rest, or run a loop that does not repeat streets.
2. Put customers with set hours first, such as stores that open early, schools or businesses that close at midday.
3. Group stops on the same street or in the same building one after another.
4. Avoid left turns across busy avenues when there is an alternative.
5. Ask the driver. They know which street floods, where there is no parking and which customer is never home before ten.

Keep the order stable. If you change the run every week, customers do not know when to expect the driver and the number of visits where nobody is home goes up.

In Repartamos routes are fixed by weekday, the stop order is set by dragging a list with the map in view, and the driver sees exactly that order in the app, with a button to open Waze or Google Maps at each stop.

The loading board: what goes on the truck

Loading too much means product that warms up, gets knocked around and comes back. Loading too little means sales you miss. The practical rule is:

Load = the day's orders + that route's typical sales without an order on that day + a small margin

Suppose, as an example, that the Thursday Downtown Route has 6 garrafones in confirmed orders and that the other stops usually buy 19 garrafones without an order. Demand is 25. With a 10 % margin, 25 × 1.10 = 27.5, rounded up to 28 garrafones.

Adjust the margin over time. If the route always comes back with lots of full jugs, lower it; if it often runs short, raise it.

First what expires first

With aguas frescas and juices, loading also decides which batch goes out. Always load the batch that expires first, known as first in, first out by expiry date. That way a batch that expires tomorrow does not sit in the warehouse while next week's goes out.

Count the load with the driver

What goes on the truck is the starting point of the afternoon settlement. If it is miscounted in the morning, the difference shows up in the afternoon and nobody knows where it came from. Count with the driver and keep a record of what was loaded. We explain how it is reconciled on return in the driver's daily settlement.

When a driver is out

Sooner or later a driver gets sick, has an emergency or the truck breaks down. What you should not do is rebuild the route.

• Change the driver or the truck for that day only; the fixed route stays the same.
• Make sure every customer has their location, hours and a delivery note: "knock on the blue gate", "leave it with the lady at the store next door".
• If nobody can run the whole route, prioritize customers with orders and stores, and message the rest.
• Every now and then, have a driver ride along on a route that is not theirs, so more than one person knows it.

A route that only one person knows is a risk for the business, not just a problem for the day.

When to open a new route

Opening a route means another truck, another driver and more gas. Before you do it, look for these signals:

• The route comes back late almost every day.
• Some stops go unvisited for lack of time.
• The truck empties before the route ends and customers go without water.
• There are new customers in a distant area that no route covers well.

First try rebalancing: move stops between routes or add a visit day to an existing route. If that still is not enough, open the new route and compare it with the others during its first weeks. If you are just starting the business, in how to start a water purification business with delivery we talk about when the first truck makes sense.

Simple metrics per route

You do not need a complicated dashboard. Four or five numbers per route tell you whether it is going well:

• Stops visited versus scheduled. For example, 36 out of 40 is 90 %.
• Reasons for missed visits: closed, did not want any, not home. If "not home" keeps repeating with one customer, change their time or their day.
• Sales per stop: the day's sales divided by stops visited. If a route sold $5,400 across 36 stops, that is $150 per stop.
• Garrafones recovered versus lent. If the route lends more than it recovers, read how to keep track of the jugs you lend.
• Return time and differences in the settlement.

Compare each route with itself, week over week, more than with the others. Every zone is different.

Quick checklist

• Set fixed routes by weekday, with each stop's own days.
• Group customers by zone, balancing workload rather than kilometers.
• Order stops with the map and the driver's experience.
• Load orders plus typical sales plus a small margin.
• Send out the batch that expires first.
• Count the load with the driver.
• Cover absences by changing the driver for a day, without rebuilding the route.
• Track stops visited, sales per stop and garrafones recovered.