Freight & parcel logistics in Scandinavia
Our customer, a leading global freight provider in a major Nordic country, needed a new automated tour planning system.
Greenplan won the official tender, beating several established tour planning and optimization providers.
To serve all customer needs we have designed and implemented a tailor-made business rule engine around our standard product.
Greenplan won the tender and was 8 % better than the next best solution
8
% better
Value for customer delivered by Greenplan
Increased tour planning efficiency and better processes
Lower costs and less tours
We reduced the total km driven and the number of tours compared to the status quo
Less vehicles needed
We enabled higher utilization of most vehicles and thus increased productivity
Lower CO2 emissions
We enabled a smaller CO2 footprint by planning a lower number of tours as well as less km driven
Lean processes and better usability
We enabled a new level of user efficiency by improving the whole planning system - including a modern GUI
Best solution considering the big picture
We strive to fully understand the true customer's needs and pain points. That is why in this case the final scope exceeded the initial customer's requirements and addressed the problem in a long-term sustainable way
Holistic approach to the task
Careful and thorough requirements elicitation
Full support during every project stage
How we did it: a custom-made business rules engine (BRE)
The custom BRE allows to model, create and manage a vast array of business requirement and rules. Modelling all business processes of the customer e.g. shipment consolidation or the utilization of subterminal infrastructure ensures operational processes that are efficient and serve the customer’s need at the same time. The system is highly scalable due to the modern cloud-native design.
Top-3 features that enabled the success story
Customized design of a business rule engine
Fully dynamic route planning
SaaS model
Setup
More than 1200 tours daily
25 terminals and numerous subterminals
Large service area
Planning routes for a heterogeneous fleet
Challenges
Limited time to calculate tour plans
Processing times for individual shipments need to be low to provide the best service to the end-customers. This implies extremely narrow time windows for tour planning
Integration with multiple legacy systems
Greenplan had to be integrated with both up- and downstream systems in a very heterogeneous IT-landscape in accordance with customer's group-wide policies
Non-uniform delivery region
Due to the large service area the conditions of delivery range from pedestrian zones in city centers to sparsely populated rural areas with a long driving distance
Considering multiple shipment types together: pallets and parcels
Such setup significantly increases the complexity of the system due to numerous interfaces between the two parts of the customer's operations
Quote from a Greenplan team member
"It was a challenging but very interesting journey to take one of the most business critical operational systems of our customer to the next level. We enabled them to be more flexible and more efficient with both planning and operating their pickup and delivery tours."