Flower delivery has a particular shape. The volume is not high, but almost every drop carries a promise attached to it. Before the ceremony. Before the office closes. Before she gets home.
That makes it a scheduling problem more than a distance problem, which is the opposite of how most route planners are built.
Why the shortest route is often the wrong route
Optimising purely for distance produces a tidy loop that ignores the only thing that matters, which is when each drop has to land. The shortest route that misses a two o'clock wedding is worthless.
What you actually want is the shortest route that still keeps every promise. Those are different problems, and only the second one is worth solving.
The parts that are easy to get wrong
Windows taken at the counter and never written down. The order says "before 2pm" in a notes field nobody reads at load time. Then it is in the driver's memory, and the driver is having a busy afternoon.
Time at the door. A reception desk that signs immediately and a residential drop where nobody answers are not the same stop. Plan on drive time alone and the afternoon quietly runs late.
Fragility and heat. Not a routing constraint exactly, but real. The order that has to survive longest in the van should not also be the one at the end of the run in February.
The close. Deliveries have to be done in time to close the shop. Working backwards from that is often more useful than working forwards from open.
Planning a day, practically
Start with the fixed points. Whatever has a hard window goes in first, and everything flexible arranges itself around them. That is the reverse of the usual instinct, which is to plan the loop and slot the timed ones in afterwards.
If the windows do not fit, you want to know at nine, not at two. That is the moment to call a customer and move something, and it is a very different conversation at nine than after the fact.
What RouteMate does with it
Time windows and time on site both go into the solve, so the order that comes back is the shortest route that still keeps your promises rather than the shortest route full stop.
Every stop comes back with a predicted arrival. If one of your windows genuinely cannot be met, RouteMate names that stop and the reason, before the van leaves. You get to make the call rather than discover it.
Getting the stops in is deliberately quick, since a florist's list changes all morning. Paste them, type them, or photograph the card if that is where the address is.
Where it stops
RouteMate does not take your orders and does not talk to your POS. It plans the run. The order still arrives however it arrives.
And it cannot invent time. A day with more timed deliveries than hours is a day that needs a second driver or a conversation with a customer, and no sequencing fixes that. What it will do is tell you which it is, early enough to act.
Worth trying on a busy day
Test it on a Friday or the week before an occasion, not a quiet Tuesday. Put the real windows in. A quiet day will not tell you anything, because on a quiet day almost any order works.