Trucking Optimization

From UG

Revision as of 04:00, 11 May 2010

Core Business Requirement

It is required to optimize total cost of domestic trucking business within one country (focus on USA now) for one company's supply chain for given time frame (let's say one year).

It is assumed that there is a constant flow of orders: O1, O2, ... , Oj, ...

Each order is about moving specific amount commodities (cargo) characterized by set of parameters: {Weight, Pieces (Num of palets + loose), Volume, Available Date, Due Date}

Commodities are to be moved together from Pick Up location to Delivery location.

For given Client Company there is a limited set of Up locations (origin doors) {od1, od2, ... , odN}

For given Client Company there is a limited set of Delivery locations (destination doors) {dd1, dd2, ... , ddM }

There are limited number of carriers (trucking companies) {tc1, ..., tcK} that can service country.

Each trucking company has its own tariff so we are dealing with {tct1, ..., tctK} - set of tariffs.

Suggested solutions

Number of things can be done to reduce total cost. For example:

• use economy of scale to move less frequently in as large truck as possible as full as possible
• use milk runs
• use hub and spoke
• etc (see more here: Business_Process_and_Use_Cases_for_NATP#Transportation_options)
• find carrier that charge less for selected trip

Phased approach

We follow phased approach which means that in every Sprint we add new optimization methods or improve existing ones.

Phase A

This phase was released to production on May 1.

In this first phase we added first version of Trucking_Optimization_Report. It is designed for Business_Process_and_Use_Cases_for_NATP#One_destination_and_milk_run_at_origin method.

Read Trucking_Optimization_Report article for more details.

See new version at April_21_NATP_Changes#Figure_2.a and April_21_NATP_Changes#Figure_2.b

This spreadsheet is changed from grouping by "pick up state" to grouping by "pick up zone".

Zoning

• Client Zones based on historical data
• Client Zones based on incoming data
• Client Pick Up zones
• Client Delivery To zones
• Trucker Pick Up zones
• Trucker Delivery To zones
• required Business Objects (BO)
• required CRUD for BO and required logic
• Trucking Optimization Report Version 2

See Create Zone at Zoning for designs

Alerts

It is an alert notification that system tells users that shipments in a particular zone location are ready to pick up. System will send an alert via email as well as show on the dashboard when there is enough shipments to fit on at least one truck. System will consider delivery location zone and pick up location zone; it is a pairing of Delivery Location zone and Pick up Location zone.

• Each time shipment is created with the weight, cbm, and/or pallets information, these info will be added to a table and calculated.
  • Each table is a combination of delivery location and pick up location zone
• The calculation result meets the minimum space to fit in one truck
• System should be able to calculate and provide information about:
  • what size of truck to send
  • how many trucks to send
  • require Haz driver or not

NOTE: It should be automatically alert real time when there is enough shipments (pallets) that need to be pick up.

Dashboard

• Create a dashboard that indicates a pair of delivery and pick-up zones, showing weight, cbm, pallets with a traffic light
• Traffic light indicates whether shipments are ready to pick up
• Dashboard will indicate the zone that needs to be pick up and delivery regarding due date
• Zones should be sorted by the earliest due date to latest due date
• Dashboard should be able to view information

• Table of zones, pallets information with traffic light, how many trucks will it need and what size of the truck and Haz driver is required or not
• bar and or pie charts
• custom maps indicates locations, zones, number of pallets that need to be pick up and number of pallets that need to be deliver at particular location. This can be indicated by color and symbol to differentiate the locations and zone, etc

Visualization

• Google Maps
• Maybe Charts

Old links

Trucking Optimization Report Version 1

see Trucking_Optimization_Report