About Route & Fleet

Route & Fleet is an independent publication about route management and fleet management software — the systems that plan stops, dispatch drivers, track vehicles, capture proof of delivery, settle route accounts and keep a fleet legal and roadworthy.

We exist because buying this software is unreasonably hard. A 12-van beverage distributor and a 400-truck utility fleet get pitched the same demo deck, the same three case studies and the same "up to 30% savings" claim. Nobody explains what actually changes on a Tuesday morning in the yard.

What we publish

Our library covers ten subject areas, from route optimisation theory to sector-specific playbooks:

• Route planning and optimisation — territory design, sequencing, time windows, dynamic dispatch and the constraint modelling that makes or breaks a plan.
• Fleet management software — platform architecture, module scope, integrations, implementation and the operating rhythm around them.
• Route accounting and DSD — mobile invoicing, settlement, van inventory, pricing and promotion handling for direct store delivery businesses.
• Telematics, GPS and IoT — trackers, sensors, video, data quality and turning signals into decisions.
• Mobile workforce and driver apps — proof of delivery, field service workflows, offline design and driver adoption.
• Fleet maintenance and assets — preventive maintenance programmes, work orders, parts, downtime and lifecycle costing.
• Compliance and safety — hours of service, electronic logging, inspections, driver qualification files and audit readiness.
• Costs, ROI and fleet finance — cost per mile, cost per stop, total cost of ownership, software pricing models and business cases.
• Software buying guides — requirements templates, RFP structure, demo scripts and scoring frameworks.
• Industry playbooks — how the work really runs in beverage, vending, propane, laundry, waste, pest control, HVAC and adjacent trades.

Who writes this

Route & Fleet is written and edited by one person, Nil Masferrer Jiménez. There is no newsroom and there are no desks — the byline is a real name and it is on every article.

My background is business administration and finance, and that is where this site is strongest. Route and fleet software is sold on operational promises but bought on a financial case, and the financial case is where most buyers are on their own. So the analytical work here is mine and I stand behind it:

• Unit economics — cost per mile and cost per stop defined properly, with the formula and the assumptions written out, because those two figures mean four different things depending on who is quoting them.
• Total cost of ownership and cost-to-serve — what belongs in the model, what gets left out of vendor calculators, and how the answer moves when you change the depreciation basis or the utilisation assumption.
• Pricing structures and contract terms — the six ways this software is priced, how each one behaves as you scale, and which clauses decide what a renewal costs you three years out.
• Business cases and payback — building one that survives a finance director reading it, including the sensitivities that a vendor's ROI sheet leaves out.

Where the rest of it comes from, and its limits

The operational and regulatory material is a different kind of work, and it is compiled rather than lived. Its sources are primary documents: regulator publications and the instruments themselves, manufacturer and vendor technical specifications, standards documents, and published industry and academic research.

Every article in compliance and safety, telematics, fleet maintenance, and costs and ROI — the four areas where being wrong has a cost — carries a Sources section at the foot linking the actual text: the eCFR part, the EU regulation on EUR-Lex, the DVSA or AEPD guidance, the IFRS standard. Read the instrument rather than my summary of it. That matters because rules are amended far more often than summaries of them are, and because a claim you cannot check is a claim you should not act on.

The other categories — route planning, route accounting, mobile workforce, buying guides and the sector playbooks — describe practice rather than law, and cite where there is something specific to cite. They are not held to the same standard because there is no regulator to cite.

I do not run a fleet. I have never dispatched a route on a Tuesday morning with two drivers off sick, and this site does not pretend otherwise: where an article turns on that kind of judgement it says so and points you at the primary source and your own people. It also does not draw on private interviews or proprietary data. Everything here is checkable, which is the trade-off I would rather make.

What the site adds is structure and plain language. All of this information exists somewhere, scattered across regulator PDFs, datasheets and sales decks written to persuade rather than to explain. Here it is gathered in one place, defined consistently, and laid out so you can compare like with like.

And it describes capabilities and trade-offs rather than declaring a winner. Two businesses with identical vehicle counts can need opposite systems, and a ranked list that ignores that is entertainment, not advice. The editorial policy sets out the full method, including how corrections are handled.