When a routing team is facing complex optimization challenges, looking for a tech solution is often the first step. But not all routing teams are technical experts. For teams looking to do advanced or complex last-mile routing optimization, Adiona’s in-house team of experts are on hand to help.
The routing challenges
Two Adiona customers worked with our optimization team to solve their complex routing needs. Let’s take a look at their route profiles:
Customer one
This logistics organization specializes in medical equipment, with both pickups and drop offs in difficult destinations. Their in-house fleet of drivers have their own territories so they can build long-term, deeper relationships with customers and understand the destination’s characteristics such as loading dock limitations, the correct entrances, and to give the customer a consistent point of contact.
Customer one’s challenges
This organization uses territories to give each driver the required depth of relationships and routine with each customer. Territories quickly become unbalanced as soon as new customers are added, or existing customers churn. Some drivers end up with too much work, while others have not enough.
Additionally, each customer has a different frequency of pick ups and drop offs. Sometimes, one destination will have several pickups per week, but only one drop off, or it’s not fixed at all and is instead on an as-needed basis. Meanwhile, other destinations are visited only once every few weeks.
With frequence, truck capacity, a driver’s working hours, service time windows, and toll costs all needing to be accounted for, the complexity of routing quickly compounded beyond the capacity of the team.
Customer two
The second example customer also has pick up and drop off routes, this time to office buildings and other business locations in high-density metro areas. The destinations have intricate factors including loading dock access, service lifts, and in the case of airports and prisons the driver needs security clearance. For these reasons, this customer also prefers territories with consistent drivers.
Customer two’s challenges
Similar to customer one, territory balancing is an ongoing process as customers are added and removed from routes. The pick ups and drop offs are on an as-needed basis, and the business would like to move towards automated daily dynamic routing, which they are a few steps away from.
Trip frequency variations introduce surprising complications. The less frequently a stop is visited, the less experience a driver has with streamlining the delivery. However, a high frequency stop may have a volume that’s requiring multiple drivers to visit it, which is also an opportunity for optimization.
In both customers’ instances, they wanted their day to day operations to be more predictable. In some circumstances, certain drivers were holding critical territory knowledge in their experience, making them irreplaceable and creating bottlenecks where other drivers couldn’t perform the routes if the original driver was sick.
Adiona’s process
Working directly with the routing teams at each organization, our in-house team completed the following process:
- Understanding the data, constraints, the routing team’s processes, and using this to recreate the current baseline to compare optimizations against
- Ingesting historical data to run simulations and see how the routes perform against the requirements, and where necessary transform the data into Adiona-compatible formats
- Where needed, map consignments to stops, to improve delivery time calculations
- Simulate peak season to factor in fluctuating capacity and working hours, using historical data to average trip durations, truck capacity, and asset utilization
- Identify local inefficiencies and group stops to create new local areas
- Model the number of drivers, territories, and shifts to find the optimized setup
- The route outputs are stress tested against real world constraints, ensuring the territories are balanced with enough work, while still being possible for the driver to finish work on time.
This process takes up to two weeks to complete, with a significant amount of that time spent collaborating with the routing teams.
Learnings across each customer compounds
Simulation is important for experimenting in a safe environment
Notably, Adiona’s team doesn’t focus on adding to a fleet, or changing systems. Our simulation tool keeps the fleet composition the same, with real-world constraints and requirements, to safely test optimizations with room for error before rolling anything out.
Reducing the risk of changing a route is essential to ensuring routes are optimized not just from a distance or delivery volume perspective, but also from a commercial perspective.
Dedicated routing tools beat spreadsheets
Many routing teams are using spreadsheets to optimize routes. Using a visual tool with a map interface is non-negotiable for optimizations. For example, if stops are optimized by a postcode in a spreadsheet column it will totally miss the geography of that postcode, which might be oddly shaped, illogically grouped, and inconsistently sized.
Once stops are displayed on a map, groupings become visually obvious, even if clusters cross several postcodes. Trip duration between stops is also better understood in a visual display, giving instant confidence or instant inefficiency identification.
What you optimize for matters
Optimization isn’t a single answer. Every logistics organization will have a different combination of factors that have varying levels of priority for them.
The quality of the routing outputs is the most critical factor. With Adiona’s FlexOps and Fleet Simulator tools, supported by our in-house team, logistics organizations are seeing significant lifts in metrics across commercial viability, customer satisfaction, driver experience, and emissions.
