 New developments in appointment scheduling and mobile working are among highlights on the stand of MapMechanics, one of Britain’s longest-established specialists in logistics and geographic solutions, at the Logistics Event this summer. The Chartered Institute of Transport and Logistics’ annual exhibition and conference takes place on 24 June at the Hilton Metropole, NEC, Birmingham.
Having built up a reputation in the transport and logistics world as a supplier of optimisation solutions, MapMechanics will be demonstrating its ability to schedule goods, people and resources to best effect and manage activities in the field. The company will also be showing how it can take on major projects to implement systems that use these capabilities – underlining the fact that, in addition to acknowledged expertise in distribution solutions, it has emerged as significant supplier of comprehensive solutions for field service and mobile workforce management.
Among new developments on show will be the latest version 3.1 of TruckStops, which has enhanced ability to take account of the EU’s Working Time Directive requirements. TruckStops now includes the ability to plan driver breaks on the basis of accumulated driving time, taking account of maximum continuous work time and continuous work break time. It automatically maintains a correct relationship between drive breaks and work breaks, allocating the appropriate type and duration of break at the correct place in the route.
TruckStops can now also calculate and report on specific time periods (travel time or time spent at stops, for instance) in much smaller time increments. Where previously it considered time values in whole minutes, it can now work in decimal points of a minute – invaluable on multi-stop work, especially where call points are very close together. A driver might take only seconds to drop a package in a letterbox or deliver a bottle of milk, and for optimal performance a scheduling system like TruckStops needs to take account of this.
To meet the increasingly wide range of scheduling tasks encountered nowadays throughout the logistics world, MapMechanics has developed a wide-ranging scheduling suite, using a judicious mix of in-house and proprietary resources. As logistics organisations move increasingly towards scheduling delivery or service appointments at the time of booking, the company will be demonstrating a range of products to handle this requirement, combining its experience of routing, scheduling and distribution territory management with its extensive knowledge of browser-based mapping.
The company’s solutions take account of factors such as the current location and skill levels of mobile staff to allocate the most appropriate person to each task, and draw on a range of location-based information systems to facilitate functions such as efficient booking by call-centre or back-office staff.
MapMechanics will demonstrate how its solutions help optimise the entire process from appointment-taking right through to proof of delivery management. For example, the company enables businesses to manage the movements of mobile staff dynamically, combining elements of job management, routing and scheduling, real-time navigation and vehicle tracking.
Daily schedules are transmitted wirelessly to the mobile workers, making it faster and easier for users to amend the sequence of drops or add or omit a call from the drivers’ workloads.
Out in the field, job completion can be recorded using barcode readers, signature capture and/or photography, and if a job cannot be completed because of a problem on a site, a time- and date-stamped picture can be recorded against the job to show the nature of the problem. And all this information can be sent back to base in near-real time.
The driver’s job is meanwhile made easier because job details are displayed on the driver’s PDA or other mobile device in correct call sequence, and navigation instructions to the next call point are presented automatically. Calls can even be amended back at base, and revised schedules fed to the driver “on the fly”.
This MapMechanics Mobile system is now managed via what is known as the Mobile Commander module. This is built on core geographic information technology, which means it is effective not just in real-time management, but also for a wide range of strategic analysis, including “what-if” modelling and comparisons of planned with actual performance by mobile worker or area.
MapMechanics’ display at the Logistics Event will also highlight the company’s central role in the UK market as a supplier of geographic information systems, network planning solutions and UK and global data for planning, business analysis and vehicle tracking.
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