FLO (Fleet Logistics Optimiser)
What is FLO?
- FLO is a vehicle scheduling system designed to improve fleet utilization and reduce delivery costs.
- FLO finds delivery routes that minimize costs. These routes are printed on customized trip sheets or sent to hand-held devices and used by the drivers.
- FLO compares the actual route driven to the suggested route using GPS satellite tracking. Any unauthorized vehicle use is automatically identified.
- By improving vehicle routing and loading and reducing driver misuse of vehicles an overall reduction of up to 20% in delivery costs can typically be achieved.
- Regular routes can be downloaded or interactively defined. Master routes can be maintained and each route can be individually optimized.
- For warehouses environments, FLO facilitates pre-scheduling by creating routes before all orders are finalized. These routes are then updated once all orders have been received.
- Geocoding on vector maps with full street search.
- Plan routes for future days.
- What-if planning.
- Stand-alone, or centralized server.
- COM automation.
- Full security with user profiles allowing different users access to specific parts of the system.
How can FLO help you?
- Plans your deliveries in the most efficient way
- Reduces your operating costs by:
- improving your fleet utilization,
- reducing waiting time,
reducing distance traveled, - and minimizing the number of vehicles used
- Enables you to identify and record the costs associated with your fleet
- Automatically assess and record the performance of each driver
- Improve customer service
- Enhance your investment in GPS tracking units
FLO Features
Business Rules
- Delivery windows: for example, no deliveries to restaurants during lunch.
- First on route, last on route, only one on route.
- Job priorities: for example, chicken farms before beef farms.
- Furthest drop first.
- Vehicle size exclusion: for example, no vehicles bigger than four tons allowed on garage forecourt.
- Product class exclusions on vehicles: for example, no products needing refrigeration on non-refrigerated vehicles.
- Offload times by weight or volume.
- Vehicle, driver and sleep-out costs included.
- Multiple shifts or picking waves per day.
- Specific shift time per vehicle or vehicle class.
- Vehicle compartment modeling.
- Bulk deliveries.
Tracking / Monitoring
- Able to integrate with all popular tracking solutions.
- Displays the daily schedules and actual tracked routes on a vector road map.
- Automatically identifies routes taken and deliveries made.
- The time spent at each customer and the cost of each delivery is calculated.
- Download schedule to onboard computers and tracking equipment.
- Calculate real-time expected arrival times.
- Flag late deliveries and un-authorised vehicle use.
- Learn travel and stop time from tracking equipment.
Debriefing
- Full debrief functionality for driver and for jobs.
- Each job is debriefed at the line detail level.
- Drivers must explain all unscheduled stops and stops are marked as authorized or unauthorized.
- Stop times at each customer are recorded either automatically through GPS tracking or manually.
Driver and Vehicle Reports
- Driver routes - A trip schedule showing all customers and items to be delivered.
- Driver trip reports - For each driver showing authorized and unauthorized stops as well as budgeted and real costs and distances.
- Exception reports - All unauthorized uses of the vehicles. Stops at customers not on the schedule are highlighted as well as stops at unknown locations.
- Customer service For each delivery, the cost, and the time spent at each customer and tardiness.
- Report on adherence to driver hours regulations.
- A report generation facility is also included.
Databases
- FLO keeps up to date databases of customers, products and routes by using live links to your back-end databases.
- The product database has a size or mass associated with each product so that FLO can automatically calculate the size of each invoice.
- The database of vehicles has any number of vehicle types and the fixed and variable costs for each vehicle type.
Jobs (Deliveries)
- The jobs for the day can either come from the invoicing database or from a set of regular routes.
- Regular routes can be downloaded or interactively defined.
- Master routes can be maintained and each route can be individually optimized.
- Ad-hoc jobs can be entered manually.
Route Planning and What-If Comparisons
- Advanced randomized algorithm to plan routes.
- Manually plan routes or change the suggested routes.
- Use drag-and-drop to move deliveries between vehicles.
- Allows what-if comparisons between delivery schedules.
- Calculates marginal cost of each delivery.
Add-On Modules
- Strategic planning.
- Fleet configuration.
- Service-day assignment.
- Evaluation of costs of various distribution centres.
- Evaluation of primary and secondary distribution strategies.
- Spreadsheet interface for what-if analyses.
- Automatic geo-coding.
- Mapping of multiple customer master files to a unified master set.
Customer Testimonies:
“FLO is much more user friendly than the other routing and scheduling systems I have used”
- Morné Clark, Transport planner
“The main feature of FLO is its adaptability and flexibility to accommodate our specific requirements”
- Willem Botha, Logistics manager
“FLO can simulate even a very complex operation,
I will recommend it to any company”
- Nico Richter, Contract manager
“With FLO we were able to go live on extremely tight deadlines in a mission critical role” - Gerald Field, Warehouse manager
