Posts Tagged ‘Territory Planning’

Isn’t that one of our main objectives in life, whether the setting is business, participation in sports, your personal life?

I see part of our role at Profit Point as helping our clients to achieve their potentials. We do this by applying mathematical techniques to find good solutions to the problems that business leaders face. Many of our clients call upon us when their business is going through a time of transition, particularly when there is a merger of organizations.

Analyzing the potential for facility rationalization is one of the standard uses of our Profit Network infrastructure planning software. We, and clients, have used this software to decide how many plants, production lines and warehouses they need to best serve their customers in many different types of situations.

But mergers present opportunities to organizations further down the supply chain as well, of course. Many companies use vehicles to deliver product to customers on a regular basis, and when there is a merger (and at other times) well-run businesses are looking for ways to ensure that these types of activities are carried out efficiently.

Our Profit Vehicle Planner (PVP) software can help in planning for a merger at that next level down – for instance, when you have two organizations serving customers in a metro area, how do you combine them together?

The diagrams below give you an idea of the situation a company might face. They have operations in various parts of the country, serving hundreds of customers in each area. Their Southern California customers might be spread as in the pattern in the diagram below on the left.

To serve these customers they currently have five route territories, covering the customer deliveries, as is shown in the diagram on the right.

Now they plan to merge with a smaller competitor in the same type of business. The acquired company has customers in southern California with a similar spread across the geography, divided into two territories, as is shown in the diagrams below.

PVP will allow the analyst to look at all of the customers together,

and in this case, when the territory planning algorithm runs, it finds that deliveries can be made in six more-compact route territories, covering all customers. Separately the two companies had seven territories – and merged they have the potential to serve them with six – thus saving a truck and various associated expenses.  The merged solution is shown below.

Implementing this merged solution can help the company better achieve its potential – for profits.

Upgraded Vehicle Route Planner Software Improves Decisions in Distribution Planning, Fleet Sizing, Driver Productivity and Transportation Cost Reduction  

Profit Point announces the introduction of Profit Vehicle Planner™ 3.1, a major upgrade to our distribution analysis and design software. Profit Vehicle Planner is designed for Strategic Logistic and Transportation Managers that have large fleets with multiple daily delivery stops and changing logistics processes. The software update includes a combination of new features and technical enhancements which combine to support richer scenario modeling for larger large fleets with multiple daily delivery stops and changing logistics processes.

Designed to be highly accessible and customizable, Profit Vehicle Planner (PVP™) uses standard Microsoft business tools for calculation and display of information, including Excel, Access and MapPoint. The software automatically creates and designs the optimal sales/distribution territories. It does this by dividing customers into territories and days of service, with each territory representing the volume delivered by one delivery vehicle and one driver over the course of the planning horizon. The objective of the proprietary heuristic algorithm used in Profit Vehicle Planner is to assign customers to territories that will minimize the number of trucks required to serve the customer volumes while delivering within the various common and business-specific constraints, including customer frequency of service, hours available per day, volume available per truck, unique equipment requirements and virtually any other custom constraint required.

“With 12 years in the field, Profit Vehicle Planner has been put to the test against some of the world’s largest supply chain distribution problems,”  noted Jim Piermarini, Profit Point’s Chief Technology Officer. “Transportation best practices have expanded over time, so decision makers are looking for more comprehensive strategic logistics and transportation modeling solutions.”

With the new release, PVP’s expanded features include extensive customization of the software to tailor the territory planning solution to be cost and time effective to meet your unique and specific distribution requirements and the ability to use imported address data to automatically geocode customers for whom lat/long data is missing.

For companies that perceive distribution as mission critical, users have the option to integrate PVP deeply into their supply chain systems to import and export data in to their ERP system. Companies that seek the most cost-effective solution have the ability to import virtually any relevant data from an Excel template that includes the following:

• Customer data such as address, location, frequency of service, volume per stop, time required per stop, other data as needed
• Truck data such as size, days of the week that it is available, order in which it is to be scheduled, hours available each day, special equipment, other data as needed
• Warehouse and district data such as location and characteristics of associated trucks and drivers
• Time related data such as start date of planning horizon and number of weeks in the planning horizon.
• Product specific data such as unit of measure of the product being delivered
• Any other data required to accurately model unique constraints

Once optimized, users have the ability to review and assess the characteristics of the territories that are created using tables and maps to provide an enhanced visual experience. And to ensure the optimal distribution plan, users can manually move customers from one territory to another or from one service day pattern to another (e.g. from Monday-Thursday to Tuesday-Friday), if desired.

To learn more about Profit Vehicle Planner and Profit Point’s distribution planning services, visit www.profitpt.com.