Delta Corporation (Zimbabwe)
Delta Corporation of Zimbabwe uses the drop-shunting model for the distribution of canned and bottled beverages from its rural depot to various sized outlets. Before the implementation of the model, the depot ran a typical fleet of 10 horses and trailers. Drop-shunting the same number of jobs has shown a 70% reduction in the horses used and a 50% reduction in the number of trailers.
What is Drop Shunting?
Maximizing fleet utilization, while satisfying customer constraints, is an important goal in vehicle logistics. A typical problem with horse (pulling vehicle) and trailer combinations is that while trailer utilization may be high, horse utilization is affected when it must remain idle during long trailer off-loads at a customer.
Ideally, for the horse, it would drop the trailer and pick up a pre-loaded trailer at the same site, a technique known as a 'drop and hitch'. If no trailer is available for pick-up, the operation is simply a trailer drop. While these methods often work in single drop, full truckload environments, they are generally infeasible in multi-drop and less than truckload scheduling. There is however a seldo mused scheduling method, which can be employed known as 'drop-shunting'. Horse and driver utilization can often be dramatically increased when the inter-customer travel time is small relative to off-load times in a multi-drop environment. Using this method, trailers are not dedicated to a single horse, but are dropped at a customer and shunted by the best available horse to each subsequent drop along the route. Examples of how this works are shown below.
Synchronization, between the horse drivers and the leading hands of the trailers, is carefully controlled through the use of separate horse and trailer trip sheets. This documentation informs the driver and the leading hand, which of the corresponding trailer and horse to be hitched/unhitched, as well as the scheduled times and planned duration of each job.
