PLATO (Primary Logistics & Transport Optimiser) Scheduler
Logistics optimizing is optimally using your resources to execute requested jobs within a set of real-world parameters and constraints. Plato takes this concept to a new level:
- Plato's scheduling has the flexibility and power to create real-world schedules; breaking the often arbitrary distinction between primary and secondary transport.
- Plato's Track and Trace enables you to take control of your logistics to know precisely what is happening and what has happened.
Scheduling
The following forms the basic recipe required to create and maintain realistic schedules in Plato.
1. KEEP TRACK OF ALL RESOURCES (Vehicles, Horses, Trailers, Loading bays, External fleets)
Availability of resources is one of the important real-world constraints the optimizer needs to consider. It is pointless to optimize a plan using a vehicle/loading bay that is currently being used by another schedule. All the benefits of optimizing are lost if the plan does not take into account the need to wait for busy resources. Plato carefully keeps track of all resources: what they are doing, when, where and for how long.
2. KEEP TRACK OF THE REAL WORLD PARAMETERS AND CONSTRAINTS
Some of these real world parameters are related to customer service, and some to physical realities or working hours, etc. All of these must be realistically modelled to achieve realistic schedules.
Real world constraints
- Vehicle/Trailer ð Product. Restrict or allow certain vehicles from loading certain products.
- Vehicle ð Trailer. Restrict or allow certain vehicles from pulling certain trailers.
- Site ð Vehicle. Restrict or allow certain vehicles from going to certain sites.
- Product ð Product. Restrict certain products from being loaded on the same vehicle or section of a vehicle.
- Loading bays ð Vehicle. Restrict or allow certain vehicles from using a loading bay.
- Loading bays ð Product. Restrict or allow certain products from being loaded or offloaded on a loading bay.
- Loading Bay can be restricted to either only offload or only load
Real world windows
- Job window (The earliest a job can start, and the latest the job should be completed by.)
- Job defined loading window
- Job defined offloading window
- Site class windows (Business hours of class)
- Site windows (Business hours of site)
- Loading bay offloading windows (Business hours for offloading at bay)
- Loading bay loading windows (Business hours for loading at bay)
Stop times
- Stop times are one of the hardest aspects of a scheduler to get right.
- Stop times are defined by vehicle class site class or by vehicle class site combinations.
- On a loading bay, the stop time is defined by vehicle class.
3. KEEP TRACK OF THE COSTS
Plato accurately keeps track of the distribution costs. But some costs are very useful for scheduling, but not for financials (e.g. The loaded and empty cost per km of a vehicle). Plato actually keeps track of three separate costing concepts:
- Scheduler costs are the costs that are used during optimizing.
- Reporting costs are the costs that are used for internal reports.
- Contract costs can be set-up to keep track of the costs to be used for invoicing.
4. ADD FLEXIBILITY TO YOUR JOBS/TASK DEFINITIONS
Sometimes the way jobs/tasks are defined actually limits the optimizer unnecessarily. Plato has a very flexible job/task definition. You can:
- Define line items to include must-go, can-go quantities. A must-go quantity specifies the quantity that must be delivered, but the can-go quantity ensures that your vehicles are never under-utilised.
- Create reducing orders that can be scheduled on multiple schedules and/or multiple vehicles.
- Create reducing orders with must-go can-go quantities that vary over time.
- Schedule jobs through cross-docks. You don't have to create two separate jobs to handle cross docking. You can also allow the optimizer to decide when to cross-dock.
- Sometime contracts are negotiated with vehicle suppliers to handle regular routes at a discount rate. These can be modelled in Plato with contract routes.
5. ENTERPRISE LEVEL TRANSPORT PLANNING
Transport planning across an entire enterprise with multiple planners at multiple sites brings a whole new level of complexity to the planning process. Plato facilitates this with automatic job locking, allocation of areas to specific planners, rough edge scheduling, and allocation of vehicles that are temporarily in an area to the planner for that area.
6. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF IMPROVED OPTIMISATION FLEXIBILITY
To make the most of an optimizer it makes sense to optimize as much as you can together on one schedule. This is sometimes impractical and can even hinder other business processes. Plato provides a flexible scheduling interface making it both practical and optimal within each schedule, without over-booking any of your resources. In Plato you can have multi-planners, and there are no day boundaries. You can plan selected jobs over a month, week, day, or half-day.
In Plato you can also schedule:
- Trailers
- Drop-Shunting, (when you leave a trailer at a customer for loading/offloading to be picked up later)
- Shifts changes
- Load for empty back-legs
7. ENSURING THAT YOUR DATA IS CORRECT/VALID
An important aspect of scheduling is the continual maintenance of data e.g. the location and offloading time at your customers. The optimizer works within the bounds of the data, if the data becomes incorrect, so do the schedules.
Plato uses two techniques to help maintain the data:
- Data inheritance: Data is entered only once for each data concept. There is therefore significantly less data to enter/maintain.
- Data transparency: Data is made visible at all stages when scheduling, allowing the planner to identify and correct incorrect data while scheduling.
Track and trace
By combining the schedule with GPS tracking data, Plato tracks the progress of each trip, each task on each trip and the progress of each shipment. Once tasks can be identified as complete, the latest remaining scheduled task estimates can be recalculated by taking full advantage of the scheduler engine.
Through tracking, the actual costs of schedules can be calculated more accurately and the latest positions and full vehicle travel and stop histories are available.
Plato makes track and trace information available through web portals for ease of access.
New optimizing concepts
Plato is an ideal tool to evaluate new distribution strategies. You can turn on features, or redefine jobs to test/quantify and implement these concepts. With Plato, you can:
- Optimise cross-docks
- Introduce sleep-outs
- Introduce a new shift (shift changes)
- Introduce horses and trailers
- Drop shunting
- Multi - principle
- Back-leg scheduling
