Every business recognises the importance of its delivery operations to the success of its business. Whether your products are delivered on your own fleet or via a third-party service provider or perhaps even a Courier, that delivery is often the only physical touchpoint you have in your supply chain to your customer.
Getting the right planning solution to ensure that you meet your customer aspirations effectively is really important in maintaining both cost and service advantage in your marketplace.
Our team of transport consultants have many years’ experience of evaluating transport planning and optimisation solutions. We have worked with clients with the most basic pencil and paper planning solutions right through to the most highly integrated order management and transport planning solutions. No matter how evolved your organisation may be, getting the right solution for your organisation is critical to ensuring the long-term success of your business.
The right transport planning solution may not need to be particularly technical. It may be that as an organisation you may simply need to occasionally replan your vehicle schedules. It may be that you have little influence over the precise scheduling of your customer deliveries, for example if you use a Courier to deliver to your customers for some or all of your demand. Where you are able to influence your decision-making process, getting the right system and solution in place can really help you reduce cost, enhance service and improve your sustainability objectives.
The world of transport management systems can be quite complex, there are some solutions that will simply tell you the best route to market for your product i.e. which service offering you should use. Typically, these are termed transport management systems or ‘TMS’. A TMS however will not typically dynamically plan a vehicle for you. If you want to execute planning yourself, then assuming your business has outgrown the old-fashioned pen and paper/spreadsheet-based approach, you are likely to need a Routing & Scheduling planning system.
Where you do need a new system, it is important to understand the type of system you need. There are many types of TMS and Routing & Scheduling system available on the market. Some will fit with certain types of organisations much better than others. There are a range of considerations you must think of when you are considering which solution may work best for you. This will include the size and volume of the types of deliveries you do (i.e. do you deliver big full loads, or smaller consignment drops).
You must also consider how much involvement you want in the planning process. This will ensure that you select the right kind of solution that gives you maximum management input whilst delivering the greatest level of efficiency. Often however, these two things do not go hand in hand, as transport planning systems will typically work best when they are allowed to work their magic without too much management input.
The way to enable transport planning systems to work effectively for you is to ensure that firstly the requirements and specification of the system are correct for your type of service aspiration, and secondly that you undertake rigorous product setup process to ensure that all necessary decision points and criteria are correctly captured within whichever planning tool you optimise with.
Clearly the cost of the tool is important, but the cost of selecting a bad tool will be much greater if incorrect selection and solution design is carried out in advance of implementing the solution.
Our team have personally implemented transport planning solutions that have delivered award-winning results. In one case, a national building materials company was able to reduce its vehicle fleet by over 40% simply by planning the fleet more effectively and dynamically. Such savings will be out of the ordinary, but as a typical rule of thumb, moving from a manual unscientific planning process to an automated well-designed process will typically yield in the region of 10 to 15% transport cost savings. For many businesses this could add up to a significant cash value.
If you are interested in finding out more about how quality transport planning can help improve your business, please get in touch with us so we can discuss your requirements in greater depth.
