Dynamic Levelling for Inbound Logistic
STATUS: Supplier organizes daily material call-offs
One of the world’s largest suppliers to the automotive industry, based in Canada, manages the inbound logistics of its 347 manufacturing facilities in 28 countries. Material is shipped from multiple suppliers into production plants based on material call offs generated by MRP systems such as SAP.
Challenge: Lack of optimization of transport planning
Today material is shipped based on the planned MRP demand schedule no matter if trucks are fully utilized or just partly loaded.
The generation of demand call offs in existing MPR system is not considering transport optimization. However, optimization of truck utilization offers enormous cost savings potentials to logistics costs. In addition, a reduced number of transports also significantly reduces the CO2 footprint.
Solution: Dynamic Levelling
Implementation of flexis Dynamic Levelling, which is part of the flexis Transport Planning & Scheduling (TPS) software solution. This solution optimizes the utilization of trucks by adapting call off dates and volumes planned by the MRP system within permitted boundaries. How does this work in detail?
- flexis dynamic levelling receives part demads scheduled by the MRP (SAP) System for next n weeks and calculates the number of handling units (e.g., pallets) to be transported based on packaging information
- The flexis solver engine optimizes the truck utilization by levelling handling units, (pulling them ahead or postponing them to fill up trucks as close as possible to their maximum transport capacities
- The solver uses internally generated constraints that define the possible time range of levelling for each material number and guarantee an even distribution of the material numbers adapted.
- The truck optimized call offs are transferred back to the MRP (SAP) System, where the changes must be updated and fixed.
The flexis solution provides the ability to monitor for each day of the planning horizon:
- Demand per route and material level over the horizon
- Calculated volumes, weights and/or loadmeters and no. of handling units
- Calculated truck utilization based on original MRP input demand versus truck utilization optimized by the system
As a result, the flexis solution provides the planner with:
- Optimized transport orders for each truck of the planning horizon
- Resulting cost savings and other KPI
Conclusion: Significant savings in inbound logistics
The flexis software enables the customer to leverage logistics cost savings by decreasing the number of transports required due to optimized truck utilization, while still guaranteeing the accurate delivery of material on time.
What’s new?
After years of effectively utilizing our supply chain management solution on-premises, the client made the strategic decision to transition to cloud technology. flexis embarked on the task of migrating existing instances from the client's on-premises data center to the flexis cloud SaaS platform. The primary challenge lay in preserving existing interfaces with other systems while also adapting to cloud architecture. This involved replacing active directory authentication with a cloud-compatible alternative. Despite the complexities, the flexis team executed a seamless and secure data migration process. The flexis team ensured the continuity of important existing functionalities such as generating documents for transportation planning, facilitating data exchange via email, and establishing secure file exchanges with SAP.