SABMiller Subsidiary: Swaziland Brewers (SZ)
An installation of FLO (OPSI Systems routing and scheduling product) was completed for SABI (South African Breweries International) at SB (Swaziland Brewers Ltd.) in 2001.
SB combined their brewing and softdrink operations. The merge brought about a number of distribution challenges; softdrink (open) vehicles can't deliver beer and beer vehicles (unpartitioned) can't deliver unstable softdrinks. Other distribution challenges apply to Swaziland, very steep roads, extensive gravel roads and rural areas, all of which exclude certain vehicles from delivering to these areas. SB run about twenty vehicles with between ten and twenty drops per vehicle. Manual scheduling proved to be very inefficient even without all of the exclusions.
SB turned to FLO to plan the daily scheduling with all of the restrictions and exclusions being adhered to. At the same time, with the help of FLO, a new fleet mix was planned. FLO uses a smaller fleet and this new mix will easily be achieved by covering and partitioning certain vehicles and only purchasing a couple of new vehicles, which will be subsidised by the sale of ineffective vehicles.
