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TruckStops halves scheduling time for timber supplier & adds flexibility

MapMechanics makes provision for prioritising deliveries, removing manual element
         
Richard Burbidge liveryBy introducing the TruckStops routing and scheduling system from MapMechanics, decorative timber supplier Richard Burbidge Ltd has halved the time it previously took to plan delivery routes from day to day, whilst at the same time gaining unprecedented power to ensure that priority loads are allocated automatically to its own in-house transport fleet.

The company delivers direct from its factory base in Oswestry, Shropshire to most parts of Britain, using a fleet of 21 curtain-sided trucks.

Once all priority orders have been allocated each day, any spare capacity remaining on the vehicles is used to deliver other orders, with heavier consignments taking precedence. All remaining orders, including lighter consignments, are despatched by parcel carrier.

“Prior to introducing TruckStops, we were using another routing and scheduling system,” explains transport manager Ian Wetherill, “but it wasn’t flexible enough to give precedence to our priority deliveries. We had to do what it told us instead of telling it what we wanted, which meant we had to spend hours every day adjusting its proposed schedules manually.”

Having reviewed alternative systems, he decided TruckStops offered the best solution, and invited MapMechanics to suggest a way to deal with the load prioritisation requirement. “They have come up with a system in which priority orders are allocated a special code, and are automatically singled out when we do the scheduling optimisation.”

What happens is that TruckStops first produces optimised schedules for the priority deliveries, then re-optimises the journeys to include non-priority deliveries as well, assuming there is space for them on the vehicles. “But this doesn’t affect the initial optimisation process,” Ian Wetherill emphasises.

In practice, there can even be a third optimisation process, since the company divides non-priority consignments into those above and those below a set weight threshold, “and we only allocate the lighter consignments when all the others have been catered for.”

The task is made slightly easier, since the company divides the country into geographical regions, and schedules deliveries separately within each region. However, extra complexity is added because many of the delivery runs take two to three days, “so vehicle availability varies a lot from day to day. TruckStops has no problem taking account of this.”

Orders are generated by the company’s IBM AS/400 computer system, which runs a JD Edwards enterprise resource planning system. Priority and region codes are included with customer details, which allows orders to be scheduled for the correct region with the use of TruckStops’ boundary selection tool.

“With our old scheduling system, the scheduling could take us up to five hours,” says Ian Wetherill. “With TruckStops it takes less than two hours in total – usually much less.”

Because of this time saving, he says it is possible to delay the TruckStops run until about 5.15 in the evening. This in turn means the computer used for TruckStops is available the rest of the day, which has brought a further saving. “We originally thought we might need to load TruckStops on two computers, so that the second one would be available for running modelling exercises. In practice, we can use the same PC for both purposes.”

The majority of the vehicles in the Richard Burbidge fleet are rigid 18-tonne four-wheelers with curtain-sided bodies – mostly Ivecos. There are also three articulated outfits, which are used mainly for deliveries to large outlets such as DIY regional distribution centres.

Most of the remaining output is despatched to timber merchants and builders’ merchants, whilst some is sent directly to building sites.

The introduction of TruckStops is part of an ongoing modernisation process being undertaken by Ian Wetherill in the company’s transport operations. He has also introduced the Eagle Eye satellite tracking into vehicles, including a navigation system. “The drivers tell me they would now be lost without it,” he says,

The Burbidge company dates back over 100 years and has operated out of Oswestry for the last 40 years. The family owned company supplies an extensive range of stair balustrading, mouldings and decking, as well as flooring and other timber products.