MICROLISE ADVANCED PLANNING & SCHEDULING

Key Benefits

  • Reduce fuel and fleet costs through accurate planning of routes and schedules
  • Reduce empty mileage
  • Improve customer service through accurate arrival time planning
  • Proactively re-plan in real-time based on exception management
  • Reduce fleet operating and maintenance costs
  • Increase productivity throughout supply chain cycle
  • Reduce office staff costs through automated planning
  • A better strategic understanding of you operations performance and logistics requirements in the future

Overview

As fleet operating costs continue to rise and the Transport & Logistics market place becomes increasingly competitive, the need for operations to get the most out of their vehicles and drivers whilst meeting customer service level expectations is paramount to the overall success of any transport or distribution business.

The Microlise APS software will help to answer strategic and tactical questions like, such as:

  • Which orders should be combined in a route (on a daily or even real-time basis)?
  • What is the best sequence to deliver (and pickup) orders in a certain route?
  • Which resources and equipment should be utilized?
  • What are the most efficient driver start times?
  • Which items should be palletised?
  • What is the best way to load your trailers, vehicles or containers?
  • What is the best network or zone design based on customer characteristics?
  • How to determine the appropriate location from which to service a customer?
  • What is the best location to consolidate orders?

Using the Microlise Advanced Planning System offers your company a new tool in the on-going pursuit for competitive advantage.

The Microlise APS embedded optimisation engine provides faster, more accurate and cost effective schedules and ensures significant savings and a very rapid return on investment.

On average, the introduction of optimization solutions results in savings of between 5 and 15 percent of operations costs.

Through intelligent software, flexible system interfaces and configurable Business Rules users are able to tailor the Microlise APS to meet their specific needs and adjust these as operational needs change. The Microlise APS allows dispatchers to manually overrule and adjust suggested schedules in order to get the best and most practical results.

The Microlise Advanced Planning System focuses on finding an optimal balance between service levels and transportation costs. The product is designed for use in an operational environment to support daily transport scheduling and dispatching where requirements may change by the minute.



Key System Features & Benefits

The system offers an environment to generate, evaluate, adjust, review and export routes and schedules.

Microlise Advanced Planning includes the following features:

Feature Key Business Benefits
Automatic optimised planning
  • Speedier decision making - Microlise APS produces optimised schedules at the touch of a button.
Delivery pick-up windows
  • Customer service level adherence - take into account delivery & pick-up windows to ensure that service level agreements are met.
Distinction between required equipment (lift gate etc.)
  • Resource validation - ensure the corrrect resources are allocated to the trip.
Real-time dispatching & scheduling functions
  • Accurate & flexible decision making - continuously optimise the schedule based on real time information from the fleet.
Multi-depot planning functionality
  • Scaleable & far reaching - supports true multi-depot planning to ensure best depot is used to support distribution.
Single-day or multi-day planning
  • Flexible decision making - perform single-day planning or support a continual rolling planning horizon as customers’ requirements / resource availabilities change.
Fully integrated with Microlise Vehicle Tracking for real-time communication of manifest to vehicles
  • Real-time visibility - use the electronic traffic sheet to monitor the performance of your fleet in real-time, automatically send pre-alerts & exception alerts via SMS, fax, pager, email or text-to-speech.
Fully integrated with Microlise Transport Management Centre for seamless supply chain execution -plan v. actual monitoring & flexible pre-advice & exception alerting to customers & employees based on adaptable business
  • Real-time visibility - use the electronic traffic sheet to monitor the performance of your fleet in real-time, automatically send pre-alerts & exception alerts via SMS, fax, pager, email or text-to-speech.
Simple flexible graphical user interfaces
  • Easy to use & analyse interface results in rapid & flexible decision making - give planners a configurable front-end designed to support their needs.
Support for tactical & strategic decisions
  • Improve & speed up strategic decision making - in addition to daily use for operational purposes, the system can also be used as a support tool for many tactical and / or strategic decisions.
  • It gives you the ability to determine which trucks & trailers are ideal in a new transportational environment (network structure, contacts, demand forecasts etc.), what prices to charge for new clients, which routes are profitable & which are not, what carriers & contracts to use or which transportation & distribution structures to choose.

Additional Microlise product modules

The following additional and related modules are available for integration with this solution to enhance functionality and deliver extended business benefits :

  • Microlise Active Journey Planner

    This module operates within Microlise Transport Management Centre. Following the import of a completed scheduled plan it provides functionality to make last minute changes to planned routes and schedules without the need to completlely re-plan. Drag and drop functionality allows additonal deliveries to be added or removed from any route or for deliveries to be moved from one route to another. Schedules are re-calculated and alerts indicate potential probelms with hours of service, SLAs etc.