Graham Currie (IT director at Ebac), Mike Brown (MD at Aquis Systems) and Francisco dos Santos (MD of Activewhere) talk about route optimisation. Story by Rachel Delahaye.
Water delivery. It may not sound like the most complicated of operations, but without efficient mapping, the simple business of driving from A to B could waste time and money.
It’s a balancing act of duty-bound drop-offs and cost expenditure. Fuel, labour and environmental (and happy logistics) spells satisfaction for distributor, deliverer and customer. Determining the best formula possible is ‘route optimisation’.
“Route optimisation can be critical to the success or failure of a water delivery business,” says Ebac’s Graham Currie. “Ensuring that the water delivery route is the most efficient possible has a direct impact on the business’ bottom line. Ebac Water Logisitics (EWL) groups delivers into geographic clusters and calculates the most efficient sequence to deliver to customers on a daily basis, reducing driver miles and fuel.”
“Distribution is the most costly and heavy department,” says Francisco dos Santos of Activewhere. “If we can increase the number of bottles or services per stop; if we can drop the number of stops without a true delivery; if we can increase the quantity of customers served in a day at the same time and with the same vehicle by condensing all the customers in specific areas for the same day; and, ultimately, if we can visit only the customers that really need water, the entire distribution concept will be optimised, including customer satisfaction.”
Economic sense tells us that grouping deliveries by timeframe and postcode would be the solution, but who has the time to go through the orders, and who has the sort of mathematical brain than can determine absolute efficiency, dependent on a number of factors?
“While it may be possible for a skilled depot manager to optimise routes manually, this can be a time-consuming exercise,” says Mike Brown of Aquis Systems. “Additionally, to maintain maximum efficiency, the exercise would need to be reviewed, if not repeated, each and every day in order to take account of ad hoc deliveries and changes to the client base.”
The solution? Like everything, it’s technical: “Subject to other operational criteria, a software-based solution should be able to react and re-optimise dynamically in order to maintain maximum efficiency,” says Brown.
With self-updating street maps and GPS, we may ask why a simple dose of common sense might not provide the rudimentary answers. But what route optimisation software gives us is more than a point in the right direction.
“The same challenges exist for manual and automated route optimisation,” says Brown. “What percentage of drops can be accurately forecast? How dense and efficient is the overall delivery area? Is maintaining the driver-client relationship important when it impacts on route optimisation? Well-designed software can overcome all of these challenges.”
“Route optimisation faces several challenges,” says dos Santos, “from geographic distances, customers’ tight specifications, traffic, drivers following their own rules and all kinds of daily problems. That’s why we believe it’s imperative to address some of the main problems, such as:
“Our goal as a software and services provider is to create a tool that allows our customers to use their own experiences to adapt and optimise their processes on a daily basis. If a trend is recognisable using the daily and monthly data, and if the business rules are defined, the software can automatically detect improvements, selecting customers to be visited, avoiding wasted visits, changing customers’ frequencies, combining several services and deliveries in the same visit or even alerting the sales department to adjust their prospecting areas based on distribution optimisations.”
And due to additional factors such as contract specifications and consumption rates, it’s no surprise that key players (even manufacturers) within the water cooler industry are building programmes to suit their own routes, and then selling it on.
“EWL is a logistics management system that has been developed specifically for the water cooler industry,” says Currie. “Built on Ebac’s extensive knowledge of the market, and tailor-made to meet the day to day needs of operating a water business, the fully integrated software simplifies the entire administration process of customer orders to improve efficiencies and reduce errors. Furthermore, EWL offers an optimised delivery management solution with synchronised electronic data capture and real-time visibility throughout operations.”
While gadgets are getting smarter, the customer’s list of requirements is getting bigger. So where does electronic route optimisation go from here?
“The main focus in the software industry is definitely switching towards handheld software rather than ‘back office’ software,” says Currie. “The field engineers and delivery drivers are the backbone of any cooler business, and it’s becoming more important to give them the best tools possible. We receive many positive comments about our handheld software, especially the online vehicle tracking element, but the comments we enjoy the most are those from the engineers and drivers, on the ease of use of the software.”
“I would say that the future in the software business is in automation: optimising processes is the only way to improve and innovate,” says dos Santos. “If well used, the customer’s data can optimise their own business to its core. Software isn’t a cost, but an investment with clear operational and financial benefits.”
“The future looks very exciting for software and IT in general,” says Brown. “The new joint venture between Aquis and Activewhere provides water cooler companies with some very exciting new options.”
Route optimisation faces a mammoth task: analysing and synchronising data with ever-changing variables. Yet, it does more than make sense of present-time orders. It has the potential to tackle logistic problems further down the road, meaning ‘anytime’ alterations and variants in the supply chain will not pose a future headache.
Rachel Delahaye is editor of Cooler Innovation magazine. Subscribe here.
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