Industry
Highlights
- High transportation costs and mismanagement of truck load and space due to lack of real-time insights and other road transportation limitations are a day-to-day challenge for consumer packaged goods companies.
- TCS’ Truck Load Optimization and Transporter Management system improves truck utilization and transportation management by monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) for efficient distribution and reduced freight costs
- It uses MILP, truck analytics, product mix, and transporter data to centralize the transport planning process, provide a single pane of view into truck and transport operations, thus improving transportation planning.
In this article
Improve truck utilization, transportation management
Consumer packaged goods organizations globally are revamping their distributor management and supply chain processes to better manage disruptions with agility and become carbon neutral.
Even as cloud-based offerings integrated with multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) and distributor management systems (DMS) grow in popularity, challenges, including high transportation costs, and mismanagement of truck load and space due to lack of real-time insights, and other road transportation limitations persist.
Current trends indicate organizing outbound shipment to help truck capacity optimization and applying strategies such as mixed integer linear programing (MILP) techniques and transporter allocation algorithm solutions can be cost-effective and help reduce carbon footprint. From procurement to delivery, incorporating enhanced time management and optimized execution are key factors that require critical analysis.
TCS’ Truck Load Optimization and Transporter Management system enabes improved truck utilization and transportation management by leveraging MILP techniques and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) for efficient distribution and reduced freight costs, besides giving a fillip to the carbon neutral journey.
Overview
In today’s hyper-volatile market, supply chain dynamics play a determining role across industries.
It is imperative for businesses to invest in smooth, predictable product flow from procurement to delivery with a concrete transportation planning in place. However, high transportation costs due to disintegrated and unstable supply chains, lack of real-time visibility into truck availability and load utilization, and sub-optimal third-party logistical (3PL) allocation driven by contractual obligations are some of the challenges that impede transport operations. This also results in increased carbon footprint and high execution time across the value chain.
TCS’ Truck Load Optimization (TLO) and Transporter Management System uses MILP, truck analytics, product mix, and transporter data to help centralize the transport planning process, provide a single pane of view into truck and transport operations, and reduce overall cost in transportation planning. TLO enables transporter planning based on monthly shipment forecast, 24-hour advance planning, and real-time load optimization. It also provides management solutions for optimal execution, bills and claims management, and truck order management.
With real-time qualitative and quantitative metrics scorecards and KPIs, TCS addresses service performance initiatives.
Solution
TCS TLO solution (see Figure 1) combines information on truck types, transporter data and product mix.
It helps with truck load optimization by:
Enabling monthly forecasting of number and types of trucks for better transportation planning
Preparing trucks 24 hours ahead of schedule
Optimizing run vehicle load in real time by weight and volume, thus helping save on transportation costs.
Identifying limitations at product hierarchy level and type of packaging based on truck type
Recommending filler stock keeping units (SKUs) to optimize truck utilization and product mix based on number of delivery destinations and truck type
Prioritizing earliest reserved SKUs for optimization
It aids transporter management by:
Simplifying transporter allocation
Delivering reports and dashboards
Enabling alerts and notifications
Executing truck order
Facilitating bills and claims management
It boosts transporter service performance by:
Providing scorecards with qualitative and quantitative metrics to boost informed decision-making
Truck Load Optimization, or TLO, is a framework to improve truck utilization for efficient transportation management
Benefits
TCS’ TLO offers quantifiable benefits including:
Enhanced truck utilization with automated tendering
Superior truck forecast
Improved collaboration with channel partners and integration with multiple systems
Slashed transportation costs and reduced carbon footprint with enhanced visibility and control and increased efficiency in distribution
Reduced manual efforts with automated manual processes
Actionable real-time insights for enhanced decision making
The TCS Advantage
TCS has proven expertise in offering supply chain management solutions to consumer packaged goods, retail, manufacturing and distribution, and high-tech industries.
So, by joining hands with TCS, enterprises across the globe can leverage:
- Industry partnerships and alliances: We lean into our strategic partnerships with hyperscale cloud providers to build best-in-class connected vehicle platforms. Our solution is built using microservices-based architecture and can be easily integrated into any customer landscape through our application programming interfaces (APIs).
The right blend of technology and domain expertise: TCS has extensive experience in delivering supply chain solutions for consumer packaged goods companies with business segment-specific templates.
Domain experience: We bring in deep industry experience through partnerships with seven of the top 10 consumer packaged goods companies globally. We actively engage with over 80 customers across the consumer packaged goods domain. Our sustainability solutions help organizations become carbon neutral seamlessly.
