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There are many obstacles in the path towards optimised scheduling: licence fees are seen as a cost, rather than a way to save money; the lack of resources with skills to use routing systems; the fact that a lot of business rules are stored in drivers’ heads; and the fact that transport is often seen as the “black hole” beyond the loading bay that is too difficult to investigate and change.
But the number one obstacle is the lack of good electronic data on the way the vehicles are scheduled now. Without that information, it is very hard to work out how much can be saved from optimised scheduling. It’s also very hard to work out the real business rules and constraints if you don’t know which ones are actually being adhered to now.
Over the past year or so, the quality of data available to companies who have expressed an interest in
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Odyssey has improved considerably. This has resulted in some quick and easy implementations which simply haven’t been possible in the past. This has saved us a lot of time and money, as we’ve previously had to spend weeks to firstly manually enter information from hard copy runsheets, and secondly work out which of the runsheets had in fact been written up back at the depot and thus couldn’t be believed! Little of this time has traditionally been billable and was just done in the hope to eventually make the sale.
The rising price of fuel has also worked in our favour and most of our recent implementations have been for manufacturers, rather than transport companies, who want to see first-hand how to reduce their transport costs. It seems the cost of transport is now high enough to encourage companies to take the time to model various scenarios to work out the best way to service their customers at minimum cost, rather than outsource this responsibility to a third party.
And all this obviously helps our bottom line!
Nicola Williams
Managing Director
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