Now that the election is over, and your email inbox won’t be getting the frequent solicitations from the party or candidate of your choice, the Strategic Movements team would like to offer you something different: our new website. Over the past few weeks, we have been working on ways to tell our story better and we feel that the new website tells it effectively. We are combining it with new emails for our blog and video posts and are actively promoting with social media.
Although Strategic Movements may be used as a manual dispatching tool, or to maintain and dispatch master schedules of static routes, it provides the greatest savings when used for dynamic routing. Dynamic routing, also known as automated routing or autonomous routing is the technique where the work of a human route planner, load planner or trip planner is done by a computer process.
The history of mankind is full of cases where a tool is discovered or invented, and that tool is used to make some task easier or more efficient, or both. From tools as simple as picks and shovels, to looms and sewing machines, to automobiles and airplanes, ways have been found to complete a task in less time than had been required before. So why are so many things still done in an inefficient manner?
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.