Your dispatcher can only meet the logistical challenges successfully with a powerful Delivery Route Planner.
He needs a software for route planning, which increases the planning quality by integrated route optimization and at the same time reduces transport costs.
Or do you trust your driver: he eventually informs you but you may not know about dissatisfied customers until it’s too late?
Or do the drivers decide the order they visit each stop by themselves? Do your drivers waste time on this?
Are you always informed about real quantities on the vehicles and delays in time?
Do you have a delivery route planning system that supports them with automated dispatching suggestions and digital maps?
Or does he still spend some of his working time searching for shipments, archiving and sending electronically? Does your dispatcher spend time printing transportation documents?
“Do your dispatchers also have to deal with the same or similar challenges? In the following Case Study, we describe effective solutions in scheduling.”
Peter Phillips (Business Solutions Manager)
KRATZER AUTOMATION
The dispatcher William F. is responsible for more than 40 primary distribution vehicles. Approx. 1/3 of the vehicles come from subcontractors.
The data for the dispatching team is only available two hours before the vehicle loading process begins.
The daily loading process starts at approx. 5:30 am. Most of the drivers are generally there earlier. Max must have completed the planning by then. If he does not succeed in doing so, he risks delaying departure of the vehicles and the order delivery time slots cannot be met.
William has at his disposal a simple delivery route planner that is not designed for his needs. He is thus forced to execute most of his dispatching tasks manually and to use the software only to print the route manifests.
William is under enormous pressure. He has to consider all order, customer, vehicle and driver restrictions in a short period of time. At the same time he has to consider the transportation costs.
He must also minimize mileage.
William does not have a cost optimized planning solution and is also faced with an increasing amount of orders. This was reflected in increasing transportation costs and growing delay rates.
William makes dispatching decisions based on the shipment data received from customer notifications and inbound shipping documents.
The information concerning volume, weight and packages is not checked against the planned inbound shipment amounts. Discrepancies can at best only be noticed by the driver during the outbound loading process.
As a result unnecessary time is wasted in identifying loading shortages which occur during an already time-critical process. Planning corrections are then needed in order to insure optimal routes and an efficient loading capacity.
His supervisor has identified this as an urgent issue to be resolved and has started to search for an operational IT support solution. It was very important for him that the new software would manage a combination of fixed routes together with dynamic route planning.
In addition, the drivers should be connected to the software via the mobile application and robust handheld devices.
They chose cadis following a detailed analysis of the different software solutions available on the market. cadisPUD was chosen over its competitors due to its comprehensive range of functions and its high degree of flexibility.
The cadis ruled-based tool automatically presorts all shipments. Either immediately to predefine routes (trips) or to shipment blocks that are then optimized into trips using the dynamic route planning option which makes full use of sophisticated algorithms.
Within each route the system calculates the optimized stop sequence.
The stops are sorted by taking into consideration delivery/collection time slots, vehicle requirements and the shortest time or distance travelled. The drivers now receive clear and detailed guidance.
The drivers are only allowed in exceptional cases (and only after having consulted with William) to deviate from this guidance.
The most cost-effective route (whilst still taking into consideration all time slots) is suggested by the system for spontaneous collection orders.
William sees the collection stop on the map and can display the nearby routes (trips). In addition the impact on mileage and time are displayed. The system will suggest the best routes to assign the new collection to.
After having approved the suggestion the order is integrated in the selected route and is sent to the mobile device of the driver.
William can see the current status of each order in real time. This is possible as occasional drivers also process the orders via the cadis application on their own devices (mobile phones) so order tracking can be seen for both own fleet and subcontractor drivers.
Different status colors displayed in lists inform the user at a glance about the current order status. Red status indicates a need for action, green status means orders already completed.
The current vehicle position together with the partially completed route and the planned remaining route are displayed on the digital map. William has an instant overview of the remaining route status by displaying real time traffic information.
Finally he is able to give current detailed information to the customer – without having consulted with the driver – about the exact positon of the goods and vehicle. This can all happen before any time slots are broken.
All relevant dispatching data is displayed in the form of overviews and lists on two monitors.
During his training on cadis, William has hidden data columns that are not relevant to him. He has adapted the sequence of the chart columns, the screen size and the position according to his own requirements.
So now every time he logs into cadis all the screens and charts will be displayed according to his personal needs and William can start to work immediately without any further setup.
For different tasks William has generated and saved several different screen layouts; he can switch easily between them at the touch of a button.
The integrated message service, cadis informs William about the current route events. The following information is particularly important for William
If one of these events occurs a message window is displayed immediately in a visible place on his desktop.
William can now use this information to react before the driver even contacts him.
William can now identify key information for time critical shipment situations (e.g. missing items, damages etc.). He can rely on the verified information in cadis.
It minimizes an important source of uncertainty in terms of planning and allows William to achieve a higher loading capacity across his fleet. In addition, the communication problems with drivers are considerably reduced.
William and his supervisor are satisfied. The routes are now planned in a realistic operational manner as now all his additional operational business rules are automatically integrated in the dispatching process.
The driver breaks are now planned automatically and the customers’ opening times that are stored in the master data together with the order time slots are also taken into consideration.
With cadis the transportation costs are reduced by 15 % and the claim rate due to delayed deliveries are also reduced considerably.
“My initial skepticism regarding the new delivery route planner was absolutely unfunded. Now I cannot imagine my work without cadis.”
Jack A. (Dispatcher Secondary distribution)
Peter Baumann, CEO at 24Plus is impressed with the solution:
"Every additional pick-up order that is processed by one of our partners increases revenue on the one hand and enhances customer satisfaction on the other, all due to a more flexible scheduling system." At the same time Baumann considers concrete reduction of costs, particularly due to the electronic signature. "Electronic documents are as a rule of thumb about 20% cheaper in handling than paper documents, which amounts to a considerable sum with 6 million shipments a year."
