What It Does:

• Create optimal plans for assigning customer orders to vehicles and for vehicle-wise routes – including direct deliveries, multi-drop milk-run deliveries and courier deliveries – so as to serve customer orders within serviceability commitments and minimize transportation cost
• Recommend fleet sizing, i.e. the optimal mix of dedicated vehicles of various capacities and vehicles hired on a short-term basis
• Meet customer serviceability targets, minimize transportation cost. Maximize orders served per vehicle (i.e, maximize vehicle utilization) subject to weights and volumes of customer orders, availability of various vehicle capacities, route-network, average speeds and travel times, vehicle loading, and other constraints
• Run large-scale heuristic algorithm with millions of variables and small-medium scale mixed-integer linear programming model with thousands of variables in quick time
• Facilitate ‘what-if’ analysis with multiple scenarios
• Validate input data, resolve infeasibilities, and display violations of demand, serviceability, capacity and other constraints
• Report performance metrics such as customer service level (for example, on-time in-full), cost-to-serve, orders served per vehicle, and vehicle utilization
• Align sales and marketing, logistics, and customer service teams with common business objectives and facilitate inter-functional collaboration