Schedule based Transportation

[Former Member]

Hello Experts,

I am working on a scenario on which I would like your opinion:

There are 20 master routes which covers 400 pick up points on which the 32 specialty trucks need to go on fixed schedule, so say the truck 1 will go on route 1 on Monday, truck 2 on route 2 -Monday, truck 3-route3 -Tuesday etc. The source and final destination location in all the routes is a central warehourse. so kind of milk man run. All 400 pick up points should be covered in a given week. These pick ups are done on behalf of different customers. Customer does not gives any order for this, the schedule is already decided in advance. Our client will arrange for carrier, give them the route manifest for the given day. Carrier will pick up the goods and raise an invoice. Our client will bill the customer. The 20 master routes change in 6 months i.e. a new location is added to the 400 pick up points, client checks where to fit this new pick up point out of 20 master routes based on distance. In case, there is nothing to pick up on a given location, this information will come to the client but it may be the case that the truck is already en route. So lets say the truck is supposed to pick up at location 1,2,3...10 in sequence. It is at location 3 when the client receives the message that location 6 is unavailable. In that case, the client wants to see which route sequence is optimized i.e. whether sequence 4,5,7,8,9,10 makes sense or a better route has opened up something like 4,5,9,10,7,8. Based on that, the client will re route the truck. It can also happen that truck has a flat tire en route, so there is delay. In that case, client may choose to leave one of the remaining location for the pick up as this is a time sensitive pick up. So client need to decide which location to leave out of all the remaining location?

Now i am thinking of creating a forwarding order based on route. Since pick up points belongs to different customers, for every pick up point in the route I need to create a forwarding order. Combine all these FWOs that need to travel on the same route into one FO. In case two pick up points belong to same customer, I will tackle it later on by combining FWSD and create a single billing document. The charges for the customer depends on the pick up point and central warehouse. The carrier gets paid by the actual distance covered, so create FSD and then do rest of the process. I don't know how to handle the master route design part. How to run different combination and find the master route once in every 6 months? For the last part, I am thinking of using a custom program which will copy the FO data and build custom logic on top of this.

Any suggestions?

[Former Member]

Just wanted to update my thought process, so some one can clue me in on a better mechanism:

When a new pick up location is added, find distance of this new pick up location from all the 400 location. Find the nearest 5 location and check in which all master route they exist. Alternatively, I can use transportation zone to combine locations.  let us say I get that these 5 locations exist on route 1 & 2. Now create forwarding orders from this master route 1 ( using the same program- read  the discussion ) , plan it, get the charge. let us call it cost 1.Run the program again for creating forwarding orders, this time add the forwarding order for new location, plan it, get the charge, call it cost 2.  Get the marginal % for route 1. Similarly run this for route 2. Since this will happen once in 6 months, the planner will do it manually.