The Challenge: 3 Countries, 180 Drivers, 1,200 Daily Routes
Last spring a mid-sized recycling operator (let’s call them EcoCycle) knocked on our door with a classic headache:
- 62 trucks in Austria
- 53 trucks in Hungary
- 65 trucks in Slovakia
- 180 drivers speaking 4 languages
- National holidays, cross-border tolls, union rules, rest-time laws… all different.
Every Monday morning the dispatcher opened 17 Excel sheets, drank three espressos and prayed. Result?
- 14 % empty miles
- 9 drivers per week in the wrong country
- €27 k monthly overtime
- Drivers burning out, customers complaining.
They needed a single source of truth that respects every local rule and still fills every truck.
The Solution: One AI Brain, Zero Spreadsheets
At gen-p-soft.com we built them “RoutePilot AI” – a no-code automation layer that lives inside Microsoft Power Platform and talks to their existing telematics (Geotab) and HR system (SAP SuccessFactors).
What the AI does in 4 minutes every night:
- Pulls tomorrow’s 1,200 collection orders
- Matches driver licences, language skills, home depot and rest-time balance
- Calculates real driving time (not Google ETA) using live toll & border data
- Creates three legal rosters – one per country – and pushes them to the driver app in German, Hungarian and Slovak
- Sends Slack alerts to dispatchers only when a human must decide
Zero macros. Zero copy-paste. Zero “but in Hungary we do it differently”.
The Numbers After 90 Days
| Metric | Before | After | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Empty miles | 14 % | 4 % | –71 % |
| Cross-border mistakes | 9/week | 0 | –100 % |
| Overtime costs | €27 k | €6 k | –78 % |
| Driver satisfaction | 61 % | 88 % | +44 % |
| Dispatcher headcount | 5 | 2 | –3 FTE |
“I got my weekends back.” – Miroslav, Lead Dispatcher, Bratislava
How You Can Do It Too (3-step copy-paste playbook)
- Connect your data Power Automate → Geotab + HR system (10 lines of JSON)
- Let AI learn the rules Upload one PDF per country → Azure Form Recognizer extracts holidays & rest rules in 2 h
- Press “Run” Scheduler triggers every 02:00 → drivers wake up to a perfect plan
Total investment: €42 k (one-time) + €800/month cloud. ROI: 7 weeks.
Let’s talk waste – and profits
If your trucks still run on Excel and hope, send me a DM. In 45 minutes I’ll show you a live demo on your own data – no strings, no sales deck.
🚛 Which country gives you the biggest scheduling headache? Drop it in the comments – the best war-story gets a free 1-hour “AI Route Health Check”.
