If you are in the transportation business, whenever you go into a large chain store, you may think about how the groceries or other products got to the store. But there are transportation issues other than product delivery to be considered.
Less than truckload (LTL) carriers provide both first mile and last mile services for organizations that move goods. Here is the best definition that I found: The first and last mile of product distribution are very crucial to any shipper. The first mile refers to the movement of products from a shipper to a courier service or to anyone who will take these goods to their final users; and the last mile refers to this final movement of products to their final users.
For an organization of any size, ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is on the list of must-have applications. There is always a need to acquire data, organize it, and then make business decisions to drive the organization forward.
If you have a fleet where every vehicle is pretty much the same with the same capacities, features and fuel economy, choosing the ones to use every day is a simple matter. But if you have different types of vehicles available, the question is how to choose the best set of vehicles to minimize the number of vehicles used and simultaneously minimize the total miles driven.