The company
Waberer’s is a leading European full truck load transportation company. With a modern fleet of over 4300 trucks and around 8000 employees, Waberer’s serves a diverse customer base across 28 countries in Europe.
The Challenge
The company’s transportation planners are responsible for a cargo-to truck plan that satisfies all of the 7000 weekly orders while utilizing the fleet in the most efficient manner in terms of time and cost. Solving this optimization problem used to be extremely challenging and time consuming, requiring up to 8 hours of planning time due to the sheer numbers of parameters and rules that the planning team needed to take into account.
Among these parameters are regulations like the work time directive EC561, and a significant number of business constraints like compatibility between orders trailers and drivers and the time, direction and location of the truck relative to the location and time of different pick up and drop off locations and many more. The planning was too complex to be done globally. Instead, the planning task was divided into subregions and different planners were allocated to plan each region.
This compromise led to a decline in efficiency as optimizing for each region locally can have a detrimental effect on the global KPI of the fleet. The fleet utilization was hovering around 87%. The long planning cycle also left no room for quick replanning due to incoming orders or asset related changes throughout the day.
The company needed a solution that could help planners optimize the plan in minutes rather than in several hours, achieving a higher utilization and delivering better KPIs on a global scale.
.png)
The Solution
NEXOGEN Fleet Planner is able to calculate with EC561 regulation and other business constraints, for example: selecting the right trailer types or making sure that the driver has an ADR license. The planning process consists of three steps. First, assets and cargo data is received from the SAP TMS and FMS systems, then the system performs the global plan in minutes, and then the result is being displayed on the planning screen. From there, the planning team can then review the plan and manage the dispatching process.
The Impact
The "loaded ratio" increased from 87% to 92%, which greatly reduced empty kms. This saved millions of EUR in fuel costs.
The ROI of the project was expected to be one year but ended up being only three months. Planners can do planning every 10 minutes and quickly react to changes that naturally occurred during the operation.
