Optimize orders into routes

When you have more orders than you'd want to group by eye — or you'd rather Nash work out the cheapest, most efficient way to carry them than decide that yourself — you optimize. Optimization is the same job as building a route by hand, done by a solver: you hand it a set of orders and the contracts available to carry them, and it returns sequenced routes that are ready to review and dispatch. This article covers running it and saving the result; for grouping orders yourself instead, see Build a route from orders.

Run the optimizer

Start from your Ready-to-Dispatch orders, select the ones you want optimized, and choose Optimize. Nash walks you through a short setup:

• Choose or attach an optimization strategy. The strategy is the configured bundle that tells the optimizer which contracts it may use, how many vehicles are available on each, and every other lever it solves against. Picking a strategy is how you tell the optimizer what "good" means for this run.
• Run it. Nash offloads the actual solve to its optimization engine and returns a set of sequenced routes — which orders travel together, in what order, on which contract — along with the cost of each route and the total.
• Review the result. Look over the routes the optimizer proposes before you commit to anything. Running the optimizer on its own doesn't create or change any routes; it just shows you what it would build.
• Save it as routes. Saving is the step that actually creates the routes. They land on the Routes tab as drafts, exactly like the ones you'd build by hand with Create Route.

Saved routes are yours to review, edit, and dispatch from the Routes tab like any other draft route — see Edit a route to reshape one and Dispatch a route to send it out. Optimizing and saving never dispatches anything on its own; dispatch stays a separate, deliberate step.

What the optimizer is weighing

Choosing a strategy is choosing the whole set of levers behind the result, and it's worth knowing what those levers are even though you don't set them here on the Routes side. In broad strokes the optimizer balances:

• Constraints a route has to respect — vehicle capacity, how many orders a route may hold, maximum driving distance and time, delivery time windows, service time at each stop, driver breaks and hours, and any capabilities an order needs (like refrigeration or a particular vehicle type).
• A cost model — what "cheapest" means: the cost of putting a vehicle on the road, the cost per mile and per hour, and per-stop costs. This is how the optimizer decides one grouping beats another.
• Sequencing and grouping — which orders should stay together or stay apart, and the order stops are visited in.
• How hard it searches — how much effort to spend looking for a better answer, and how tightly to cluster work, trading solve speed against route quality.

All of that lives in the strategy, not on the Routes tab. For what each lever means and where you configure it, see Optimization strategies (Automate ▸ Strategies) — and for every input by field name, including the advanced parameters, the optimization parameters reference.

Let it run on a schedule

You don't have to start an optimization run by hand every time. A strategy can also run on a schedule — gathering the eligible orders, optimizing them, and saving the result as routes (and, if you set it up that way, dispatching them) without you opening the optimizer at all. It's the difference between optimizing on demand and having routes waiting for you.

This scheduled option is availability-gated: whether you have access varies by organization, so if you don't see it, reach out to Nash.

A note on who carries the work

The optimizer weighs your contracts and picks the most cost-effective way to carry the orders, but Nash still only dispatches the resulting routes — a provider or your own fleet makes the actual deliveries. Optimization decides the plan; it doesn't change who's driving.

Availability

Optimize, like the Routes tab it feeds, depends on whether your organization has routes enabled. If you don't see the Optimize action, availability varies by org — reach out to Nash.