The cheapest compliant plan — before the courier ever bills.
Ship Steward’s optimizer turns the real-world constraints of long-term care — signatures, facility types, time windows, hub geography — into routes you can defend. Three phases, built for LTC, not generic delivery.
Ship Steward Route Optimization is a three-phase route optimization service built for LTC pharmacy constraints — it plans the lowest-cost compliant route network so savings are locked in at the plan, then proven against the courier’s invoice. Gallatin is what this looks like when it lands.
Why isn’t basic route optimization enough for LTC?
Because pharmacy delivery has constraints generic logistics tools don’t model — and route software that dispatches and forgets never closes the loop on cost.
Hard Time Windows
Committed facility deadlines and overnight handling that a generic VRP solver simply doesn’t respect.
Facility Realities
Hospitals, campuses, and homes each carry different service time, parking time, and multiple signatures per stop.
Route / Stat / Sweep Mix
Scheduled routes, stat on-demand, and sweeps all priced differently — optimizing one without the others leaves money on the table.
Dispatch-and-Forget
Route software plans and walks away. It never checks the plan back against what the courier actually billed.
How does Ship Steward optimize a route network?
Each phase is measured against the last, so every trade-off is made against a real target.
Blue Sky — Idealized Baseline
Classic VRP with relaxed constraints establishes the theoretical efficiency ceiling — minimum time, distance, and vehicles — so every later trade-off is measured against a real target.
Production — Time-Critical Core
A reverse-Gantt method works backward from facility deadlines to align pharmacy production and release times with driver dispatch — the core of the optimized plan.
Relays — Stem-Leg Reduction
Linehaul vehicles carry volume to hubs; relay vehicles handle the last mile — cutting non-productive stem legs that drive mileage without adding service.
What does optimization save in practice?
Same pharmacy, same courier, same compliance footprint — a different route plan and renegotiated rates.
Gallatin is a realized client result. Demonstrated optimization potential elsewhere runs to ~29% cost reduction and ~40% fewer miles; actual savings depend on the network and are confirmed by a full optimization pass, not guaranteed up front.
Questions buyers ask
How is this different from the route software we already have?
Most route software dispatches and forgets — it plans a route and never checks it back against the invoice. Ship Steward optimizes the plan, then audits what the courier actually billed against it, closing the loop between the plan and the spend.
What LTC constraints does the optimizer actually handle?
Service and parking time per stop, multiple signatures per stop, facility types (hospital, campus, home), time-of-day traffic, committed end-times and overnight handling, toll optimization, and load balancing — across route, stat, and sweep work.
How much can routes be reduced?
At Gallatin, optimization plus renegotiated rates took the weekly invoice from $21,760 to $15,500 like-for-like — about $325,000 a year. Demonstrated potential elsewhere reaches ~29% cost reduction and ~40% fewer miles; your result is confirmed by a full optimization pass.
Does optimizing routes mean changing couriers?
Not necessarily. Gallatin was the same courier on an optimized plan with renegotiated rates. When a rate gap is large, RFP Support re-bids the optimized routes — but the first win is usually the plan itself.
See what your routes could cost optimized.
Share a site’s current routes and we’ll run the same three-phase pass that produced Gallatin’s $325K/yr.
Request an Optimization Pass