Transportation planning is the biggest leverage for shipping costs. The same number of deliveries can be made with four vehicles or six vehicles, depending on the planning; the difference goes directly into profit.
Scope
Shipment consolidation: Combining deliveries destined for the same region on the same day into a single vehicle.
Vehicle and capacity planning: Distributing the load under constraints related to weight, volume, number of pallets, and vehicle type.
Route optimization: Determining the stop sequence by considering distance, time, delivery window, driver working hours, and road constraints.
Vehicle restrictions: Inclusion of height, tonnage, hazardous materials transit bans, and city entry restrictions in route calculations.
Multi-stop journey: Combining pickup and drop-off in a single trip; return load planning.
Mode selection: Choosing between road, sea, air, or rail based on cost-time balance; planning multimodal transport.
Dynamic rescheduling: Re-planning the schedule in case of cancellations, additional orders, traffic, or vehicle breakdowns during the day.
Scenario comparison: Comparing alternative plans in terms of cost, duration, and service level.
Carbon accounting: Calculating emissions on a per-trip basis and incorporating them into planning criteria.
The limit of optimization: data quality.
Route optimization is a powerful tool, but it's only as good as the input data. Incorrect addresses, missing coordinates, unrealistic product dimensions, and unrecorded delivery windows produce mathematically perfect but impractical plans.
Therefore, the first step in optimization projects is not the algorithm itself, but cleaning up the address, measurement, and customer constraint data . Every time the driver says "this plan won't work," it actually points to a data deficiency.
Benefit to the customer
The number of vehicles and total mileage decrease.
Vehicle occupancy rates increase.
Delivery windows are incorporated into the plan, reducing delays.