Loomis

Challenge

IT manager at Loomis Denmark, Sune Henriksen, explains, "The main reason for us to implement a route planning system was that we experienced significant losses on our money distribution. Since this is the core of our business, we needed to turn around the situation."

"Moreover, we had just won a cash handling deal with Denmark’s largest retailer. As a result of this, we had an urgent task of merging these new stops into our existing routes. After having looked at many different distribution planning systems over the years, we chose to carry out a pilot implementation of AMCS Route Planner."

Solution

AMCS Route Planner was implemented in 2005, and Loomis Denmark purchased the system shortly after the pilot period. "The implementation went rather smoothly, and the operational managers quickly got the hang of the system," notes Sune Henriksen.

"Before AMCS Route Planner was implemented, route planning involved a group of 8-10 planners and drivers who spent 160 hours creating the master plan manually. Afterwards, we spent another 160 hours entering the routes into our main system. This high time consumption resulted in the plans being optimised only rarely. Therefore, our routes were, and remained, very inefficient."

"The main challenge for us was that the drivers had to get used to the idea that the plans could only be optimised by the system and the operational managers, not by the drivers themselves."

"The drivers were not too satisfied, but then we started to involve them in the verification of the initial routes by showing the routes in the digital maps. In this regard, the map feature is really good, because it is easier to evaluate input from the drivers when you have it visually in front of you."

Results

"We are highly satisfied with the results we have obtained with AMCS Route Planner", concludes Sune Henriksen. "Because of the enormous amount of time saved in planning and the large reductions in distribution costs, we have achieved a very rapid return on investment."

Major benefits from implementing the system:

• A significant reduction in the number of vehicles and drivers.
• A 99,9% service fulfillment rate after having re-planned the master routes.
• Time spent on planning reduced from approximately 300 hours to 8 hours in total.
• Master planning frequency increased by 20-30 times.
• Better internal coordination and easier cost-benefit analysis of customers.