There are many ways to get information about trends and possible opportunities in almost all fields. This morning, I was reading the October, 2020 issue of Trains magazine and found an article on intermodal opportunities. While Strategic Movements does not handle intermodal shipments, the article cited some interesting statistics on motor freight in general.
Restaurants need more than food for their operations. One necessary service is the delivery of new fry oil and the picking up of the expended product on a regular basis. In addition to a normal schedule, the provider also needs to handle emergency deliveries and needs to change the following day schedule when an emergency has caused schedule disruption.
QuickBooks has been one of the most popular accounting software products over the past few decades. It is now used by a very large number of both small and medium size businesses and is available in both desktop and web-based versions.
Although there are large savings to be achieved by implementing a dynamic routing application, there must also be the awareness that changing from a loosely implemented manual process to something more rigorous will require business process changes.
One thing to consider is that, in a manual process, there can be a lot of tribal knowledge in the dispatch office, or individual head knowledge, of important parts of the process that are either not written down or only exist in some unorganized documents.
There are many organizations that are still planning their routes manually every day. Some use some simple web-based tools to visualize each route and some have no automated tools at all.
There are more than just a few vendors offering route planning solutions. Some are just simple tools to automate parts of the route planning process, some are parts of a complete transportation management system, but most fall somewhere in the middle, with features that they found useful to their customers.
Many organizations need to track their vehicles during the workday. And once the decision has been made to implement a tracking process, a vendor needs to be selected to provide this service.
But before there are answers, there must be questions. And the first one is what features are available from the various GPS vendors and what are the benefits provided?
Anyone that works in an organization with service technicians or delivery workers that drive to customer locations knows that there is always some planning that needs to be done each day to get the work done. In the simplest case, a load planner prints out work tickets from a business application and gives them to the worker who will be doing the driving.
Strategic Movements is a cloud-based service for route planning for both service technicians and product delivery. It provides provable benefits to its users by reducing the labor expense of planning routes, by producing more efficient routes, and by offering the capability to measure driver compliance in the execution of planned routes.
In addition to support for dynamic routes where work to vehicle assignments are made using an artificial intelligence process, and support for static routes where the assignments are made each day based on a master schedule, Strategic Movements also supports two types of manual route planning. Manual route planning with Strategic Movements is useful for organizations that make deliveries of products or provide specialized services that cannot be automatically assigned using dynamic routes and do not recur on regularly scheduled basis.
Most businesses want to reduce overall transportation expenses as much as possible while maintaining their equipment well and providing the level of service that their customers expect. For many businesses, a large part of the savings can be found using a software solution that makes intelligent decisions on assigning work to vehicles in the most cost-effective way. When the overall driving distance is reduced, so are fuel and other mileage-based maintenance costs. When the right assignments are made and the work is properly balanced, overtime costs are also reduced.