Ismael Rodríguez – Hedyla.com | Software de logística para la optimización de procesos https://hedyla.com/en/ Software logístico para la optimización de procesos Fri, 14 Apr 2023 15:28:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0.7 https://hedyla.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/logo-favicon-150x150.png Ismael Rodríguez – Hedyla.com | Software de logística para la optimización de procesos https://hedyla.com/en/ 32 32 Balancing cost and quality of service in last mile distribution https://hedyla.com/en/last-mile-distribution/ https://hedyla.com/en/last-mile-distribution/#respond Mon, 25 May 2020 07:27:47 +0000 https://hedyla.com/?p=1837 Read more]]> Last-mile distribution has one simple goal: to move goods from a transportation hub to the final delivery destination. But if it were that simple, logistic experts and optimization software would not be needed. The most important factors when planning your distribution are the constraints and environment, the quality of service (QoS), and the cost. 

The route optimizers, thanks to Artificial Intelligence, they are able to generate very efficient routes; however, these must comply with all the constraints to be able to be carried out. In addition, there is a trade-off between quality of service and costs, in which the company has to choose what suits it best according to its objective.

Constraints and Considerations

There are three types of constraints and considerations to take into account when planning your distribution:

There are many traffic limitations that involve long vehicles.

Traffic and physical restrictions: moving within a city in peak hour can take 2x or 4x the time it would take without traffic. In addition, not all the vehicles can access all the zones of a city (e.g, a supermarket chain has vans, trucks and trailers, and some stores cannot be accessed with big vehicles). This information is crucial when planning your distribution.

Quality of service considerations: clients usually expect delivery within a time window, and some of them require specific vehicles or drivers. In addition, an important QoS metric is to deliver the goods as soon as possible. Not meeting these criteria could lead to a loss of reputation and customers.

Business constraints: the most obvious are the drivers’ working times, breaks, and making sure they work a minimum set of hours. There are also many heterogeneous constraints that differ between companies, and the knowledge of logistic experts is needed. Some examples are limitations while preparing orders in the warehouse, agreements with transportation companies to deliver in certain zones, or peculiarities while delivering to some clients. 

Cost - Quality of Service Balance in last mile distribution

The goal of a good route planner is not to reduce costs as much as possible. It’s objective is to reduce costs while producing feasible routes, and with a balance of cost and QoS that meets the company needs. Let’s analyze the possible results that a route optimizer can produce:

The very low cost zone represents the routes with the lowest cost but that, due to not complying with the constraints, are not possible to execute or produce a lot of late, low quality or missing deliveries. These should be avoided.

The medium cost zone represents routes that are feasible and comply with the constraints. In this zone, the standard scenario (A) is to keep the QoS while reducing the costs, due to the efficiency of the Artificial Intelligence. From that, there are two more possible scenarios: to increase QoS with a lower reduction of costs (B), and to decrease QoS to increase savings (C) , even though this one is not very common.

In the high cost zone, the increase of the costs produces only a subtle grow of the quality of service. The scenario D represents to keep the same cost, and use the optimizer to slightly improve the quality of service, which is usually not worth it.

Every company has different constraints and different goals in terms of what benefit the optimized routes should provide. That is why it is important not only that the software can take into account all such constraints, but also that people involved in the distribution process participate with their knowledge and experience to provide such constraints to the system and make it add the most possible value to the company.

]]> https://hedyla.com/en/last-mile-distribution/feed/ 0 Beyond Distribution Planning https://hedyla.com/en/planning-your-fleet/ https://hedyla.com/en/planning-your-fleet/#respond Mon, 04 Nov 2019 08:27:37 +0000 http://34.242.8.112/?p=1410 Read more]]>

Whether you are a wholesaler, a logistics company, or have a small business that needs distribution, you have probably encountered the problem in your fleet planning, including:

    • Which vehicles to use.
    • The client orders that will be delivered by every vehicle.
    • The arrangement of the deliveries.
    • The hour when the deliveries should start.

Even though it may seem simple to manually plan this, you will soon find that it’s a hard task: not all the vehicles can deliver all the orders, the capacity of each van is limited, and the customers expect the delivery in a certain hour range, amongst many other constraints specific to every business.

Beyond basic Distribution Planning and how to solve it

Furthermore, the are many possible ways to plan your routes, and only a few really save resources, including fuel and vehicles.

Imagine that you have to plan the path of a single vehicle that needs to deliver 10 orders: there are 3,628,800 possible ways to do this, and only ONE of those is the shortest one that meets with your constraints.

If, instead of 10 orders, there are 20 orders and 4 vehicles, the ways to plan your fleet are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Can you manually find the best one? If you do, then call us, we will hire you!

Hedyla Distribution Planner

In Hedyla we have created algorithms of Artificial Intelligence that are specifically tailored for logistics distribution, being very precise, efficient, and providing plans that make the best use of your resources while improving your quality of service.

We know that even the most advanced algorithm is useless if it is not easy to use. That’s why we crafted our cloud platform to hide all the complexity while providing the best results: forget about configuring a thousand parameters to get your plan.

Just upload an Excel file with your orders, and we’ll do the rest, you’ll receive your plan in a matter of seconds, in a visual and intuitive way. If you want to make changes, just drag a client from a route to other: we will perform the simulation and tell you the new arrival times.

Hedyla solution can integrate with multiple ERPs, so you don’t even have to upload an Excel file. Every day, we will generate the best plan, keep track of the deliveries thanks to our Tracking app, and give you analytics about what happened and will happen regarding your distribution.

What If...?

Did you ever wonder how would your distribution improve if your company had two more vehicles? Or if your routes started one hour before? What if I could deliver to this client until 18h instead of 17h?

Hedyla allows you to simulate any situation and to precisely know what would have happened: the money you would save, the quality of service, … so you can decide whether you should change your distribution strategy, without any risk.

Hedyla’s AI-powered innovative solution allows you to get the most out of your resources, keep your clients happy, in the simplest way. Don’t hesitate to contact us to get a demo!

Planificación de tu flota
]]> https://hedyla.com/en/planning-your-fleet/feed/ 0 Optimizing Rotation with Hedyla https://hedyla.com/en/optimizing-rotation-with-hedyla/ https://hedyla.com/en/optimizing-rotation-with-hedyla/#respond Wed, 17 Jul 2019 11:46:26 +0000 http://34.242.8.112/?p=1349 Read more]]>

We are going to talk about one of the use cases that Hedyla's solution covers, how Business Intelligence can help to optimize articles location and detect problems.

Rotation in Warehouses

References in a warehouse are usually distributed in multiple zones (e.g, A,B and C) depending on the time they are supposed to stay in the facilities (the so-called rotation). Items that have a high rotation must be stored near the docks, while the ones that remain for days are stored in not so close positions, to speed up operations.

The rotation of a reference is usually determined by a person using their experience, the historic from the WMS, or the expected shipment time, if available. However, people make mistakes, the historic does not usually represent the future, and shipment times may change. This produces that articles are placed in wrong warehouse zones, producing two kind of effects, detailed below.

Effects of Bad Article Positioning

When an article that is expected to be rotating very frequently has actually a low rotation:

The article is placed near the docks, as it is expected to be shipped very often, but it remains for days there; therefore, it is occupying a place that could be used for articles with real high-rotation. Such articles with real high-rotation are placed therefore in a further location, worsening efficiency.

When an article that is expected to have low-rotation has actually a high-rotation:

The article is placed far from the docks, and the pickers must travel a much longer distance, and spend much more time to pick the items, resulting in worse efficiency. los pickers tienen que recorrer una distancia mucho mayor, y por lo tanto necesitan más tiempo para realizar el picking, resultando en una peor eficiencia.

Hedyla's solution

Optimizing Rotation with Hedyla

The Hedyla Cloud platform includes Rotation Maps and metrics, with two different, but equally important goals:

Detect anomalies in the current distribution of references, so if an article has been in the warehouse for more than it should be according to its current rotation classification, a warning is displayed, so the warehouse managers can act accordingly and move such article to a better place. It’s very usual to have articles that have been days without moving, near the dock, without anybody noticing.

Avisar cuando un artículo se coloca en una zona de rotación que, de acuerdo a nuestros análisis, no es el mejor. Por ejemplo, puede suceder que el SGA decida colocar crema solar cerca de los muelles porque, de media, tiene una alta rotación pero, en invierno, la rotación de las cremas es muy baja, por lo que debería ser clasificada como de baja rotación. Esto permite una planificación futura mucho mejor.

Optimización de la rotación de artículos
Map displaying zones with articles that overpassed the expected time limit for their current rotation zone

With our warehouse solution, the place where items are placed can be optimized to highly reduce the anomalies and improve productivity, not only via BI dashboards that give this useful information, but also with connection to your WMS to automate decisions and, therefore, avoiding that a human has to create orders to move articles or decide the rotation.

]]> https://hedyla.com/en/optimizing-rotation-with-hedyla/feed/ 0 Optimizing your picking with Hedyla https://hedyla.com/en/optimizing-your-picking-with-hedyla/ https://hedyla.com/en/optimizing-your-picking-with-hedyla/#respond Wed, 12 Jun 2019 09:00:52 +0000 http://demo.athemes.com/sydney/?p=144 Read more]]>

Picking is the most frequent activity in a warehouse, and the one that takes most of the time so, if you want to improve productivity in your warehouse, the picking process seems the right place to start.

Operators are assigned a set of picking activities, that they perform moving from one place to another to pick the different items from every order. Even though the operators do not stop moving and may seem that the productivity is high, it’s usually far from perfect. There are many different ways of performing the activities, and infinite ways of assigning operators to tasks that, if selected wrong, can reduce your picking productivity drastically. Hence, optimizing these processes is crucial.

Activity item order

Usually, every activity that an operator performs consists on picking several items and then bringing them to a packing or dispatch zone, where it is prepared. Even though the Warehouse Management System usually suggests the order to follow in this picking (first item A, then item B, etc.), this plan is usually generated using simple, naïve strategies such as go from left to right, go first to the nearest item, or, in some cases, the order is only determined by the operator.

There are millions of ways to perform the picking, but only one that is perfect; using the best strategy reduces around 40% the distance that the picker has to travel to pick the different items. By reducing the distance the operators move, you can dedicate more time to manipulate the pallets, perform more activities and be more productive.

Activities planning

Even though minimizing the time spent on single activities is important, the warehouse day-to-day comprises thousands of activities. These activities are assigned to operators by either the WMS or even manually by a coordinator that is looking who is free in which areas, and uses intuition and experience.

In both cases, the strategy followed is not optimal at all. Moreover, having a person coordinating the activities is an incredible waste of time that could be dedicated to more strategic tasks.

When there are tasks to assign to operators, the best decision can be made only taking into account multiple factors such as distance from the operator current point, time to perform the task, deadlines for shipping orders, and, the most important, looking at the future tasks and seeing how assigning one task now would affect to the next tasks.

Our solution

By leveraging Artificial Intelligence techniques, we are able to evaluate the millions of possible arrangements of items to pick and activities, taking into account not only the present, but also evaluating how each assignment would affect to future tasks, deadlines and performance. This is not possible with current WMSs that use traditional planning techniques or with a human coordinator.

With our warehouse solution, we complement your current systems by giving the optimal plans that allow you to take the most out of your resources, be more productive and, as a consequence, reduce costs.

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