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This month milk processor and haulier Robert Wiseman Dairies increases the number of milk collections by 50, and the company has paid tribute to the essential role played in the planning process by the TruckStops routing and scheduling system, which was supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics.
Previously the company's six-wheeler rigid tankers would complete two trips in a day - one involving offloading to articulated "reload" tankers at locally-based collection points, the other culminating in delivery direct to the company's Manchester factory. Now, with the aid of the additional collections and TruckStops' scheduling, many of the same vehicles will complete three round trips in a day. |
At the same time the company has also started using GeoConcept, the geographic information system supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics, to plan and cost new deliveries to supermarket retail outlets (more details below).
Describing the change to its milk collection operations, group transport manager William Callaghan explains: "The network of farms that supply our milk is constantly evolving, and we're finding that we now tend to deal with a smaller number of larger farms, often within a narrower radius. That gives us the opportunity to use our vehicles more economically, but it also means we need to keep updating our collection routes."
He adds that in the past the company scheduled collections manually with the aid of maps. "But we simply couldn't keep up with the complexity of the task with a manual system. In any case, TruckStops does the scheduling much more efficiently in a fraction of the time. So it's been a key to the developing operation."
The company has major production facilities at Aberdeen, East Kilbride, Manchester and Droitwich, and has been a pioneer in the use of "reload" vehicles - maximum-capacity artics that are stationed at strategic bases throughout the country, and serve as mobile collection points. Locally-based rigids deliver milk either direct to factories, or to reload artics making longer distances more efficient.
TruckStops is now being used right across the company to plan schedules both for the collection vehicles and for the articulated trunking vehicles. As a matter of routine, it is now used quarterly to revise all vehicle movements in the light of changing operating requirements, and it is also used in between times where further modelling is needed. "Until we looked closely at TruckStops, we couldn't believe such a reasonably-priced system could be so powerful and sophisticated," Mr Callaghan says.
"One of the challenges in scheduling milk collection is that the vehicles start off each day empty, and ideally end up fully loaded," he says. "It's the exact reverse of a normal delivery operation." He adds: "We found TruckStops ideal for this purpose. It's been refined in the light of the experience of other similar users, both in milk and in applications such as refuse collection, and we're finding it allows us to get better utilisation from our vehicles than any other system we're looked at."
One of TruckStops' strengths is its ability to consider multiple pickup points and multiple drop points when building schedules - an ability which makes it ideally suited to planning product collections, and especially for working with Wiseman's reload system, in which end points as well as starting and interim points may be variable.
TruckStops has also proved invaluable in forward planning and "first-cut" costing of collections from potential new suppliers, Mr Callaghan says. By using TruckStops for progressive refinements to its regular schedules, Wiseman has been able to create what amount to "look-up charts" that give approximate costs for collections from different areas, and show whether it would be best to schedule collections to reload vehicles or directly to factories.
For more precise modelling, additional pickup points are included in the collection list and TruckStops can be re-run to confirm the optimum scheduling arrangements for it.
Mary Short, Kingswood MapMechanics' managing director, adds: "Some users in the milk collection field have also been able to take advantage of TruckStops' ability to plan schedules in which not every call point is served every day." Wiseman aims to collect from all farms on a daily basis, but William Callaghan agrees that this feature gives TruckStops a potentially useful extra capability.
Wisemans operates a fleet of around 70 Volvo and Daf vehicles, and also has call on over a dozen vehicles from contracted hauliers running in its own livery. The three-axle farm collection vehicles mostly carry around 15,300 litres of milk each, while the artics carry between 26,500 and 28,000 litres.
Historically, the collection vehicles would call at up to about 18 farms per trip, but with the move to fewer, larger farms they now tend to make about eight calls per trip.
Meanwhile, Wiseman is now using the GeoConcept GIS at its head office to help evaluate and cost milk deliveries to individual supermarket outlets. Statistical analyst Michelle Paterson explains: "With GeoConcept we can geocode the location of target stores and work out which would be the most cost-effective point from which to deliver to them."
Having GeoConcept on hand has also allowed the company to use it for other kinds of analysis - for instance, to determine which customer service representatives are best-placed to handle which stores. |
