Odoo Truck Route Planner & Delivery Communication

A multi-brand building-products retailer delivers heavy goods with its own fleet of 40-tonne trucks. Planning was manual: dispatchers hand-ordered ~30-stop, multi-day tours on spreadsheets, eyeballed whether a day's driving and rest times were even feasible, phoned and emailed customers about delivery weeks, dates and time windows, and guessed which tight addresses a big truck couldn't actually reach — often only discovered when the driver got stuck.

We built a custom Odoo 16 module that runs the entire last-mile operation. At its core is a truck-aware route planner: routes are calculated with TomTom's 40-tonne truck profile — so they avoid weight-limited bridges, low clearances and truck-prohibited streets — then refined by our own optimization algorithm over a real truck travel-time matrix. On top of the raw route runs a full EU drivers'-hours engine that factors in mandatory breaks, daily driving limits and overnight rests to split a tour into realistic days with exact per-stop arrival windows. Dispatchers work in an interactive drag-and-drop planner with a live map of the actual truck route — they can lock stops, pull in nearby backlog deliveries, and search for truck parking along the way. A separate accessibility check routes every address twice (big truck vs. small) to flag, before dispatch, which customers need a smaller vehicle. Customers then receive staged, brand-styled emails — estimate, then firm date, then exact day and time window — and confirm or reschedule through a no-login self-service portal, with one template system serving every brand.

Tour planning that used to be a spreadsheet-and-phone job is now truck-correct and automatic, with realistic driving and rest times built into every schedule and problem addresses flagged before a truck leaves the depot. Customers self-confirm delivery dates and time windows online instead of playing phone tag, and all of the company's brands run from one system.