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Routes & fairness

Bundling & fairness: balancing workload across your fleet

In day‑to‑day fleet operations, success is not only about getting orders out of the door quickly. It is also about sharing workload fairly between couriers. Order bundling and fairness rules help you achieve both without sacrificing customer or driver experience.

1. Why bundle orders in the first place

In a fleet with no bundling, every order becomes its own route. This keeps the logic simple but often leads to more “empty” kilometres and under‑utilised driver time. With bundling:

  • you group nearby orders into the same route, reducing total distance and time,
  • drivers see a clearer picture of what they will deliver in their current shift, and
  • you can achieve more consistent delivery times, even when volume is high.

2. Reasonable limits and “healthy” bundling

Bundling does not mean loading as many stops as possible into a single route. In a healthy setup you define an upper limit on deliveries per route and make sure the system prefers orders that are genuinely close to each other, both in location and in time.

If the limit is too low, you miss opportunities to combine orders and end up with many short routes. If it is too high, drivers may feel that a route “never ends” and customer experience can suffer. The goal is to find a balance that fits your volume and geography.

3. Fairness: avoiding overloaded and idle drivers

A common complaint in fleets without clear rules is that some couriers are constantly overloaded while others get only a few deliveries. Fairness rules help ensure that:

  • the system considers how many active routes each courier already has,
  • back‑to‑back assignments to the same person are avoided when other drivers are available, and
  • new requests are shared in a way the team perceives as fair over time.

This does not mean everyone gets exactly the same number of deliveries every day, but that over a reasonable period the distribution is balanced and transparent.

4. What fairness means for SLAs

Without assignment rules it is easy to end up with couriers who are constantly overloaded and running late, while others are waiting. This leads to SLA breaches, customer complaints and a sense of unfairness within the team.

When you combine bundling with fairness:

  • routes are designed to be achievable within the time windows you promise,
  • the system avoids sending new work again and again to the same driver just because they happen to be close by, and
  • you can explain why one driver was chosen over another for a given set of deliveries.

5. How to get started without changing everything overnight

You do not need to enable aggressive bundling and complex fairness rules on day one. Instead, you can:

  • start with modest limits per route and a few basic rules to avoid extreme cases,
  • monitor for a few weeks how route distribution and delivery times change, and
  • gradually increase the “intensity” of bundling as your team gets comfortable with the new way of working.

The key point is that CoDeliver gives you the tools to tune these behaviours methodically and observe their impact, without requiring you to dive into low‑level configuration details.