Better Together – SmartRouting and your TMS
TMS + SmartRouting = Synergy
The complexity of road logistics has drastically increased in the last years with globalization, (de)regulation, and technological developments. Companies continuously search for ways to optimize their supply chain performance against the challenging backdrop of rising fuel- and freight rates, truck capacity, driver/planner shortage along with ever-changing and more challenging customer requirements.
A Transport Management System (TMS) is typically designed to improve and automate your staff’s administrative processes, with labor cost reductions of 20-30%, whereas the focus of SmartRouting is to reduce operational resource costs by improving the execution plan for trucks and drivers.
SmartRouting can decrease resource usage costs by about 3-5% on top of your TMS-planning functionality. Since typically the costs for office staff are usually at most 10% of the total costs, this leaves 90% of costs for the execution of planning. A relatively small improvement (3-5%) of these execution costs implies that the business value of SmartRouting combined with a TMS system is much higher than for a TMS system only.
Best of both worlds
New technologies and a vast amount of captured data across the complete supply chain are both opportunities as well as challenges.
In today’s world, it is impossible to run a profitable road logistics business without IT support systems. Most road logistics companies have invested in a TMS to support the business processes.
A TMS excels at keeping track of logistics data as it flows through your organization. However, it was never designed to optimize orders across numerous assets (from drivers and equipment to warehouses) and enable a lean, low-cost supply chain.
From our perspective, transportation management and transportation optimization are very different – and you will need both to leverage the efficiencies.
SmartRouting benefits – business value
SmartRouting covers the whole range of planning horizons, from strategic planning to disruption management on the day of operations. By providing this solution as a cloud-managed service, it is a perfect fit for asset-based companies or other transport companies managing the utilization and routing of the assets. The key benefits of this dynamic planning and optimization solution are:
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Decreased transport costs
SmartRouting creates better routes, thereby decreasing overall distance-driven and resource costs. It is equipped to schedule its own and external resources alike. Our experience in the field shows that overall distance-driven is reduced up to 10-15%, leading to a 3-5% reduction in transportation costs.
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Improved service delivery
SmartRouting produces feasible plans that maximize customer order fulfillment. It ensures service-level agreements are met and gives the user notifications when deviations occur. By experience, customer satisfaction improves measurably due to improved ETA accuracy.
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Improved transparency & control
SmartRouting improves company-wide transparency in operations, reporting, and analytics significantly, leading to improved efficiency across the organization.
Using SmartRouting alongside your TMS will help you get more employee engagement, lower CO2 emissions, be more cost-efficient, and grow your business.
SmartRouting seamlessly integrates into your existing IT landscape
Companies like Amazon, Apple, P&G, McDonald’s, and Unilever have seen tremendous market share growth and financial gains through their incredible supply chains. The global COVID-19 pandemic further magnified their success.
The great news is the software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud TMS systems have given all road logistics companies, no matter their size, access to a top-tier TMS for their business.
As we have embraced this opportunity we have developed SmartRouting – our managed SaaS (MSaaS) solution that integrates with any cloud TMS provider – to optimize your daily route planning. SmartRouting contains the combined knowledge of Ab Ovo’s 20+ years in the transport and logistics industry, along with the leading edge planning and optimization technology from Dassault Systemes (DELMIA Quintiq).
SmartRouting is typically integrated with a TMS system through standard interfacing, both for receiving the orders and execution details, as well as for providing drivers and customer service with the route plan. These interfaces with other systems allow SmartRouting to be seamlessly integrated into your existing system landscape and minimizes integration and maintenance costs.
Importance of planning optimization
Drivers have qualifications and preferences; vehicles and equipment have unique scheduling characteristics; customers have restrictions and delivery windows; routes have weight restrictions; loads have to be balanced across drivers.
Today most planners are supported by numerous Excel sheets for planning purposes because TMS does not support advanced planning. The average TMS today can handle allocated resources and show the status of the allocated resources. However, if new plans need to be made or changes happen to current plans, the planners and dispatchers rely on isolated, self-developed tools like Excel or SQL extracts.
There is a logical and efficient split between planning and planning optimization. A TMS is built to handle data in a workflow for many users in different departments. An advanced planning solution, such as SmartRouting, is built for swift complex calculations and decisions for a smaller group of users (planners), of which the result seamlessly integrates back into the TMS system.
Ab Ovo offers the SmartRouting solution to transportation companies to help solve their daily route planning puzzle. SmartRouting is a Managed Software as a Service (MSaaS) solution to ensure that customer value is delivered quickly.
Planners and dispatchers have full control
SmartRouting is a dedicated advanced planning and scheduling platform with the sole purpose to give planning and dispatchers full control of their work and their plans.
SmartRouting provides a digital twin for the planners and dispatchers to give them the true ability to build and validate an optimized plan before distributing the work schedules to operation.
To their aid, SmartRouting provides scenario planning, what-if analysis, KPI and activity-based planning, data propagation, and world-record optimization technologies.
Customer satisfaction
Ab Ovo is focused on delivering customer value. Our in-depth experience and expertise ensure that our customers are delighted. Support, both during implementation and beyond, is provided by our team of experts who know your business. We continue to keep you informed about solution software roadmaps, releases, and the value this brings to you and your company. If you require additional training or adaptation of the solution, we are ready with our team of industry experts to assist you.
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Blog - SmartRouting
Ab Ovo offers the SmartRouting solution to transportation companies to help solve this daily puzzle, based on Managed Software as a Service (MSaaS).
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Brochure SmartRouting
SmartRouting, provided as a cloud managed service (MSaaS) is a perfect fit for asset-based companies or other transport companies managing the utilization and routing of assets.
In this brochure we will show how a day in the life of a planner could look like when using the SmartRouting solution. Planning in action!
About Ab Ovo
We support our customers in the digital transformation of their business operations.
As a data driven decision support company we support this journey by digitizing decision processes thanks to our deep supply chain expertise, our smart technology and our highly skilled analytical team
