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Hello and welcome to the seventeenth edition of InTransit eq, the newsletter that will be “ e ”-mailed you on a “ q ”-uarterly basis. We try to include articles that appeal to our clients and/or our prospects and other friends in the industry. If there is something you'd like to read in future editions please provide feedback. Of course if you are not interested in being included in our circulation list, please unsubscribe where indicated right at the bottom of this email.
Nicola Williams
Managing Director
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I'm pleased to announce that Ben Condie has joined our Client Support team as our Client Support Manager. Ben joins us with extensive experience in the Freight and Logistics industry with an information-technology focus. We've found that Ben is very well suited to the role and is applying his experience to the benefit of our company and our clients.
Ben's background lies in both international and domestic freight and logistics, and in applying technological changes to aid in automation and cost reduction for businesses in the industry. He has been involved in the maintenance and support of many major automation projects for Australia's container terminals. |
"I am very pleased to have been offered a job in the Transit team. I believe that Transit provides a great product to the industry, in line with my own ideas and experience with utilising technology to the benefit of our clients’ businesses and the industry as a whole. I am thoroughly enjoying my time at Transit and look forward to many years of service to our clients."
Also joining our Client Support team is Nerida Haycock. Nerida will be a familiar voice to our clients, having had 4 years of experience on the front line, taking the majority of support calls as a first point of contact in her role as our Admin Officer. Nerida has found that, through this exposure and her natural inclination to help our clients, she has learned how to answer a lot of these calls. It is, therefore, a logical step to formally assign Nerida to the Client Support team to further her career at Transit.
Nicola
Williams
Managing Director
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| What If? |
What if fuel reaches $1.50 litre?
What if we have three interest rate rises again this year?
What if B-Triples get unrestricted highway access?
What if the following sums up your IT applications environment?
“Most of our top executives would say they haven’t been getting the benefits from IT. They’re right. Because they fail in implementation. There’s no change in the way users do things. We automate their quill pens, but they go on using them!”
Striking the right balance between efficiency and customer service is never easy. Nearly every company is impacted by rising fuel costs, driver shortages and new regulations.
In the highly competitive Australian transportation and logistics market, fleet optimisation using applications such as Transit Odyssey is increasingly becoming a necessity for supply chain networks.
The changing market dynamics pose the questions of centralised, regionalised, or localised distribution structures and which is best for business; add to this the combination of increased demand, insufficient capacity and stricter client requirements means that achieving this balance becomes extremely difficult.
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Having tools such as Odyssey to enable you to model these ‘what ifs’ allows transport and logistics networks to not only adapt to changing situations, but also to enable parallel 'what if' environments to assist in determining potential fleet optimisation and long-term strategic and tactical scenario planning capabilities.
As customers press their 3PLs to re-design their supply chains and to make those chains as efficient and inexpensive as possible, they are beating down prices through canny contract negotiations that shrink profit margins and make returns on invested capital inadequate. The result is a business model that is increasingly under pressure. As customers move from local to regional they want logistics specialists to serve them with consistent skills wherever they do business. Although the industry is at pains to respond, many logistics providers are hard-pressed to meet such demands.
Ultimately, to succeed in this dynamic environment, logistics management needs to be extremely proficient in assessing business conditions and determining how their organisation will respond. Hence, the importance of a modelling tool such as Odyssey, to assist transportation and distribution executives consider a whole range of ‘what if’ scenarios and get closer than ever to that ultimate goal of balancing their transport operations.
Call us – how can we help?
David Miller
Business Development Manager
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| Odyssey Handy Hints -Validation of individual items in a dataset |
Odyssey’s Validation manager is a very useful tool to make sure that the data you are using for a schedule contains no errors or anomalies that may result in poor schedule results - many of which are displayed as ‘Warnings’ which still allow the schedule to run. It is very important that these are checked.
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Odyssey will validate your data for any problems each time you run a schedule; however, if you wish to validate ‘as you go’ for individual items, you can do this using the right-click menus from the Odyssey Explorer screen (see picture).
It is important to remember that, whilst the validation process within Odyssey will pick up a lot of data quality problems, there may be other issues that can cause poor results, such as incorrect access restrictions, vehicle nominations, etc. If you are experiencing difficulties with any schedule results, please contact the Client Support team.
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| FAQs |
How important is my geocode accuracy?
Your geocode accuracy level, or GCA, is an indicator of how accurately Odyssey has been able to locate your customer’s location based on the address information you have provided. The highest level of accuracy is 1, which means you have selected the customer location by clicking on a map; the least accurate is 9, which means that Odyssey has only been able to locate the postcode area but not the locality or suburb within that postcode.
The accuracy of your geocodes impacts Odyssey’s ability to give you accurate time and distance to and from each customer and, therefore, will impact on work and driving time if it is inaccurate. It is particularly important if you have a densely populated customer base.
We recommend that you try to get the GCA of each customer as close as possible to 4 – street number matched within street and locality. This means that Odyssey can calculate the time and distance to the exact location of your customer.
If you don’t have the exact address information, you can select the customer location on a map. You can do this by clicking on the Map icon from the Address editor window, then holding the Ctrl key when you left-click on the map.
If you are having problems accurately geocoding your customers, please contact the Client Support team for assistance or advice.
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