Fleet reduction with the scheduling of the fractional distribution operation

In my previous post I commented on the tracking and monitoring of vehicles as ways to increase fleet productivity, with consequent cost reduction. Another possibility of gain is with a good fleet scheduling process, which must be integrated with monitoring.

Fleet scheduling must, of course, be supported by optimization software, which associates orders with available vehicles. In the optimization software, customers are grouped by areas, which can be neighborhoods, zones, municipalities, microregions, and so on. The level of grouping is related to the volume of demand, location of customers and distance between them. In this grouping concept, we link to today's post.

Orders can be scheduled daily with the oldest orders being prioritized. However, for fractional loads, it may be interesting to schedule deliveries. What does that mean? Scheduling consists of scheduling deliveries on specific days of the week for each customer. This means that customers from the same group will receive their orders on 1 or more specific days of the week.

Deliveries are consolidated by geographic region and a visitation frequency is stipulated based on the volume of each region. Based on the operation profile and customer concentration, the first region grouping unit is defined and may follow the IBGE classification (mesoregions, microregions, municipalities and districts). Depending on the locale, the level of detail of the grouping may change. In very dense municipalities, with a high concentration of customers and volume, the grouping can be by zones or neighborhoods.

Figure 1 – Steps of the Scheduling Methodology

Fleet scheduling is very valid in terms of cost reduction when the volume and frequency of orders per customer are low. In a standard model, in a situation in which we had a single low-volume order for a mesoregion far from the company's distribution center, the optimizer would arrange for a vehicle to serve this customer, with very low occupancy. With scheduling, this order could be grouped with orders from other customers in the same mesoregion and neighboring locations and delivered on the same day of the week, improving occupancy and fleet requirements.

The implementation of delivery scheduling has some points that must be treated with more care and are critical success factors. If customers demand a high level of service and a high frequency of product delivery within the week, scheduling can be a crucial alternative. The gain from implementing fleet scheduling must be estimated and presented to the Commercial area, which must assess together with Logistics whether commercially it is worth implementing the solution for all DCs and for all customers.

In addition, for sectors where there is the physical pick-up of orders through pads with the figure of the seller, the visitation schedules of these sellers should preferably be adjusted so that customers can place orders with little notice of the arrival date of the delivery vehicles at their facilities.

ILOS has its own methodology for scheduling vehicles for fractional operations, which is adaptable to the reality of each company. Our methodology can be applied to any sector and location, since, in addition to customer demand and delivery frequency information, only operational information from the DCs is required, such as speed and delivery time, and requirements, such as service level, number of drivers and vehicle type.

For more information:

(21) 3445-3000

paula.arantes@ilos.com.br