Although Rooster has been used for fixed route reviews Australia-wide for over 10 years, it has had a good workout from our Route Creation Services group over the past few months for a variety of challenging and interesting projects. Rooster is an acronym for Re-Organisation Of Sales Territories into Efficient Rounds and is one of Odyssey’s scheduling methods. It is typically used by companies who use fixed rounds to service a high-density customer base over a multi-day delivery cycle.
One project was for a client who, although they already use Rooster to optimise their rounds, wanted us to analyse the cost of the “low-hanging fruit”. We conducted “what-if” scenarios to assess the cost impact of reducing the number of visits per week to customers whose average drop size was less than a specified minimum; and the cost of cutting out altogether customers whose total volume was less than a certain amount.
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It was easy to confirm that these customers were a net cost to the business, given that 2-3 rounds per state could be saved without them!
Another project used a hybrid of Rooster and Dynamo for a client who wanted to assess the possibility of scheduling a week’s worth of orders in one schedule, with the key requirement being a balanced workload. This involved using Rooster to spread the work evenly over the week and Dynamo to spread each day’s work evenly between the drivers, while taking access restrictions and vehicle capacities into account. Usually customer preferences dictate delivery requirements; however, if you can encourage your customers to be flexible, this unconstrained approach can save millions.
A third project was an optimised re-route for sales reps over a 4-week cycle - at face value, fairly straightforward – however, the client wanted the reps to be scheduled in a wave across Melbourne so that they all worked in the same area each day, rather than in stand-alone territories. As this is an excellent way to save money on the deliveries following on from the sales call, this functionality was added to Rooster as part of the project.
Nicola Williams
Managing Director
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