In the previous article-which you can find in full HERE-we analyzed the three main cost items typical of the feed, milling and integrator industries. We can summarize them as raw materials, transportation (on purchases and on sales) and energy.
In this article we will go into detail about the second of these aspects: transportation, from deliveries to trip planning.
Optimized scheduling of loads makes it possible to meet delivery requests from customers (which often arrive with urgency) and to optimize production, which is able to have clear priorities at all times.
Optimized scheduling also allows goods delivery trips to customers to be aggregated with those for raw material pickup, greatly lowering the empty return cost to be paid to carriers or incurred by owned vehicles.
The – unfortunately – urgent nature of customer orders, and sometimes pickup orders, can put travel planners in the position of where they have to choose between optimizing travel and the desire to please customers, creating very large costs and inefficiencies.
It is not uncommon for the planner to have to make trips to an area with the vehicle not fully loaded and have to make an additional one the next day, in the same area, again with the vehicle not fully loaded.
We have been tackling these issues with clients for years, so our consultants have developed ad hoc logistics solutions.
The basic principles to be followed to optimize logistics and transportation, which have guided us to date and which we share convinced that they are useful to you, are as follows:
- Look for a tool that can automatically organize delivery orders into rounds or transport zones;
- Arrange in a designated area for ex-departure pick-up orders;
- The ability to view orders for a ride on a map and then compose the ride by aggregating the unloading points represented to a delivery vehicle is an indispensable feature to be able to better organize trips;
- Similarly, it is essential to be able to display on the map simultaneously the trips that have been prepared and the orders that have yet to be planned to allow the planner to easily change the trip composition by adding/deleting one or more orders.
Why an interactive map?
The interactive use of the map allows the user to keep track of the geographic layout of orders to be planned and trips arranged at all times so that any inefficiencies on prearranged trips can be identified immediately.
With a timely calculation of transportation costs, integrated into the planning system, it is possible to display on each trip the cost in real time with details of the method by which it was calculated, so as to identify prearranged deliveries that may negatively affect the cost of all other deliveries.
Finally, if the vehicles are equipped with GPS, it will be possible to visualize their location in real time in order to determine the progress of deliveries and, above all, the potential time required to return to headquarters.
The importance of individual trip optimization on the final budget is sensitive. This is why we are finishing the developments of a new app, for mobile devices, that will allow drivers to become real users of our logistics application FARM-X TLA, allowing them to automatically receive delivery missions and to share in real time with the planning office the occurred deliveries and annotations/photos on damages occurred at unloading.
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