Atlanta Bread Company
OPSI Systems recently carried out a study for the Atlanta Bread Company to determine whether they could achieve savings by using FLO on their predominantly long haul fleet. The Atlanta Bread Company (Atlanta Bread) is a food franchisor based in Atlanta, Georgia. They have a manufacturing plant adjacent to their distribution centre, 4 Seasons Distribution, which supplies products from straws and serviettes to juices and frozen bread and meats sold by their franchisees. They utilize 28 long-haul refrigerated 22 pallet tractor/trailers and 3 refrigerated 14 pallet trucks which in total travel over 290,000 miles (464,000 kms) a month. Almost half of their trips include back-hauls from third party customers, such as farms or manufacturers.
The backhaul requirement led to a further modification of FLO, including how the backhaul is displayed on the schedule view, as illustrated below.
We were given a list of their customers with their addresses, which allowed us to geocode their customers. They have over 165 franchisees/customers spread over 25 states in the United States. We also received their average monthly data, which included the number of deliveries per customer per month, average wait times per customer and average number of pallets per trip per customer.
One issue we had to resolve was the impact of the stringent DOT driver rules in the USA on the scheduler. The drivers’ 'hours of work' rules stipulate the absolute maximum number of hours including driving, sleep, rest and work that a driver may do in any given period. In order to accommodate the complexity of the North American driver rules, OPSI has now added a Driver Rule Module to FLO, which is flexible enough to handle all countries’ rules. With this module, FLO is able to schedule optimally to accommodate the required driver's sleep/rest periods while still making the deliveries within the customer's delivery window (thus minimizing “out of window” waiting time).
Another major issue we had to overcome was accommodating the US map set within FLO.
A number of the 4 Seasons Distribution trips are carried out using a 2 driver crew and by correctly entering the driver and vehicle costs in the FLO database, the scheduler was able to optimally utilize the 2 driver vehicles.
To recreate the deliveries as accurately as possible without detailed invoices, we created a full week's schedule consisting of 298 long haul jobs and with 56 available vehicles (historically about 2 trips per vehicle per week). Once the schedule was run, the number of vehicles required was under 25: a saving of over 11%. This is very impressive considering that the trips are all long haul with much time being spent on the road.
