TOP Trip Scheduler
A surprisingly cost-effective way to save fuel and increase your productivity
Most readers will be aware that route schedulers will save most multi-drop distributors, parcel carriers and couriers money as they reduce mileage and increase productivity. Most readers will also be aware because of the large capital outlay that these tools are usually only deployed in large fleets, that is until today. Skillweb are delighted to announce the development of a new product, called TOP trip scheduler which is cost-effective with as few as ten vehicles. The key element is a web based (software as a service) application that uses on-line and optimisers dovetailed into our trip scheduler.
The rationale is that by and large most small and medium delivery / collection operations are based on milk rounds, trips that drivers are familiar with, where they know their patch. These milk round trips form the basis of TOP trip scheduling; pre-determined by post codes, orders (deliveries, drops) auto-populate these trips and colour coded flags indicate if the trip is under-populated, fine, or over-populated. This then allows the supervisors to fill vehicles or cancel trips if they are under utilised and to balance loads if they are over capacity. Green (for go) trips can be published immediately and manifests generated. As an optional extra, supervisors can send individual trips to the on-line optimiser to minimise miles and save fuel.
Delivering business benefit
At Skillweb we like to talk about benefits in terms of return on investment. With TOP trip scheduler it is relatively easy to model your return and even simpler to determine your capital outlay. We provide TOP trip scheduler as a service, it’s a web based application and we charge you for use on a quarterly in advance revenue basis. Your fuel savings start immediately and therefore your returns. If you would like us to demonstrate how we can save you money, simply contact us – details are below. We can use your figures (costs) in our finance model to demonstrate your return.
Another key way of delivering business benefit is the built-in customer contact functionality. Build the trip as orders arrive and at a time convenient to you, and of course your customer, ring them to confirm delivery. You can provide anticipated delivery times or if the customer requires a delay, quickly and efficiently move it to another time slot or day. The result is increased first time deliveries, fewer return visits and much happier customers.
Having created your trips these can be used in multiple ways, perhaps to trigger just-in-time picking or supply, certainly to create delivery / collection manifests, with the ability to pass these seamlessly to our TOP track & trace solution.
Core functionality
We start with an order pool, populated by you from either your day book or ideally from our TOP order management module. This order pool holds jobs, deliveries, collections, swaps or returns, by date, by service level (for example a.m. or p.m.) (your promise) and so forth. It includes the usual order detail, for example: address, post code, special instructions, contact details, the items, weights and dimensions, indeed this can be configured to capture all the details you require. After uniquely logging on, your trip planners will determine which zones they will wish to work on – where a zone is any geographic area defined by you. In this way you can split your geographic areas into bite size chunks. Usually this will be set up as a default region / worksheet for convenience. Your planner can then import orders into his worksheet to populate zones; note this is again rule based, so for example I might call in all orders, irrespective of promised delivery date or I might restrict it to deliveries with a due date of tomorrow only. Your planner chooses. After importing, the workspace will apply your business rules to each zone you have set up. As discussed above the simplest rules might be based on numbers of deliveries, amber, green and red; but you can also apply weights and dimensions, heavy and awkward, service levels, special handling and so forth. The rules will be unique to your business. Your planners will then be able to manipulate the individual trips within his workspace, visualising them on a map, dragging and dropping them to adjust and fine tune. Then if required (because there is a cost) sending them off to the optimiser to determine miles and timings. Multiple plans can be created and when happy the planner can choose their preferred option. We call this stage ‘publish’ and this can be used to trigger further business processes, like supply, picking, loading, manifest creation etc.
The end result is a planned trip, customised to both your specific customer needs and your own internal requirements.
Why not contact us?
We would be delighted to give you a free demonstration or put you in touch with one of our satisfied customers for a reference or we can explain in more detail how you can achieve the above benefits. Click here to contact us.