Retail/Convenience
Operating convenience stores on the West Coast in the US, our customer has to deal with fluctuating delivery volumes every day – and their current static planning approach was not capable to handle this efficiently.
This is where Greenplan supported them with and dynamic and automated planning approach, which helped them to not only reduce the amount of required tours and vehicles, but also to reduce manual and error-prone processes.
Value delivered
More efficient capacity utilization
Avoiding the virtual limitation of 19 stops per vehicle enables a significant increase of capacity utilization in vehicles, i.e. up to >85%
Less manual workload
The automated planning approach reduces the manual workload for dispatchers, in that freeing up time for more value-adding activities
Reduced fleet size
Increasing the capacity utilization of vehicles, allows for reduction of tours and thus for a fleet reduction from 51 to 47 vehicles
Faster calculation
Significantly shorter calculation times allow a one hour later cut-off time for order reception
Improved planning reliability
Considering time-of-day dependent velocities (speed profiles) and thus realistic drive times makes planning much more reliable, i.e. meeting all critical time windows
Setup
50+
delivery trucks
supplying convenience stores in a wider US metropolitan area
1,000+
stores supplied
from inner-city stores to locations in the countryside
10,000+
orders daily
covering different temperature ranges from ambient to chilled
Manual planning
dispatcher
manual planning LTL shipments on daily delivery tours from central downtown depot
Challenges
No dynamic tour planning
Today’s planning is not done dynamically, but based on static routes that are defined once a year only
Simplified modelling
The current planning model is not capable of considering multi-trip routes, i.e. re-loading of vehicles during the day
Workarounds in planning
Since planning is based on static routes, planners assume a virtual limit for delivery stops in order to cope with daily fluctuations in volume
Inefficient capacity utilization
The simplified planning model and the virtual stop limitation leads to an efficient capacity utilization, thus requiring additional delivery tours and vehicles
Delayed deliveries & overtime hours
Massive traffic congestions in the metropolitan area leads due to regular delays in deliveries as well as overtime hours for the workforce
Manual processing
Daily planning processes are mainly manual, which is not only time-consuming but also error-prone
What is Greenplan?
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