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Part Three
Planning and control
Figure 10.17 How easy is an operation to control?
Short case 10
Routeing and scheduling helps
milk processor gain an extra
collection trip a day
Robert Wiseman Dairies is a major supplier of liquid milk,
buying, producing and delivering to customers throughout
Great Britain. The company’s growth has been achieved
through its strong relationship with farmer suppliers,
ongoing investment in dairies and distribution depots, and
excellent customer care. But, unless the company can
schedule its collection and delivery activities effectively,
both its costs and its customer service could suffer. This
is why it uses a computerized routeing and scheduling
system and a geographic information system to plan its
transport operations. Previously the company’s tankers
completed two trips in a day – one involving offloading at
locally based collection points, the other delivering direct
to the company’s factory. Now the same vehicles complete
three round trips a day because of additional collections
and a scheduling system (the TruckStops system).
Describing the change to its milk collection operations,
group transport manager William Callaghan explains:
‘The network of farms that supply our milk is constantly
evolving, and we’re finding that we now tend to deal with
a smaller number of larger farms, often within a narrower
radius. That gives us the opportunity to use our vehicles
more economically, but it also means we need to keep
updating our collection routes. In the past the company
scheduled collections manually with the aid of maps, but
we simply couldn’t keep up with the complexity of the
task with a manual system. In any case, TruckStops does
the scheduling much more efficiently in a fraction of the
time. One of the challenges in scheduling milk collection is
that the vehicles start off each day empty, and ideally end
up fully loaded. It’s the exact reverse of a normal delivery
operation.’
The scheduling system has also proved invaluable
in forward planning and ‘first-cut’ costing of collections
from potential new suppliers. By using the system
for progressive refinements to its regular schedules,
Wiseman has been able to create what amount to
‘look-up charts’ that give approximate costs for
collections from different locations.
Source: Robert Wiseman Dairies