Gist

Primary Network Optimisation and Scheduling Solution

Gist is one of the UK's largest supply chain logistics specialists, whose primary business consists of:

• Over 5,000 deliveries a week
• Moving over £4bn of stock - with half of that having shelf life of less than three days
• More than 200 collection and 60 delivery sites

Gist was looking for an Order Management and Real Time Scheduling Solution to be able to automatically schedule and optimize orders, minimize the planners' workload and maximize own fleet. Having searched the market and found no other software that could cope with the complex dynamics of their transportation domain, Gist commissioned Magenta Technology to deliver such a solution. Magenta's scheduling solution now automatically schedules 80% of Gist's customer orders and dynamically re-plans the schedule, reacting to unexpected events and dealing with multiple logistics constraints.

Gist transports a variety of goods throughout the UK using a set of fixed set of routes. They were looking to:

• Obtain cost savings and benefits by optimizing the schedule in the following areas:
  • Maximise utilisation of current truck capacity – and minimise the need for ad hoc journeys
  • Enable scheduling of up to 40% of orders after vehicles had started their journey
  • Comply with constraints – temperature regimes, collection and delivery times, customer priority, product compatibilities, product weight, etc
  • Optimise trunking through best use of changeovers and cross docks
  • Avoid over splitting of orders to prevent problems on reconsolidation
  • Make best use of subcontractors versus own fleet
  • Make best use of store returning vehicles.
• eliminate dependence of the business operations on the human factor and individuals' local knowledge with the view to ensure scalable operations and support of the business growth

The task undertaken by Magenta was to introduce a 'control tower' to automate routine manual decisions and provide a collaboration platform from which information could be shared across the supply chain with Gist's customers, suppliers and depot network.

Magenta developed for Gist a highly customised scheduling solution using proven components to meet Gist's complex scheduling requirements. The delivered solution was able to provide:

• A scheduling engine that automatically schedules 805% of orders - embracing the complexity of crossdocking, compatibility constraints of goods, vehicles and locations and trailer changeovers - that can be configured to meet Gist's transportation requirements now and in the future.. On a daily basis this module assesses in real-time more than a billion combinations of order, vehicle and their constraints
• A Gantt chart displaying the scheduling position and allowing drag and drop manual changes,
• An online web based fully integrated order entry system for Gist customers,
• A Scheduling Settings Module to enable full management of the application configuration and network related information, like: set of routes ("bus routes"), locations, customers, etc.

Using Magenta's scheduling solution Gist has been able to achieve the following key results:

• Automatic scheduling of 80% of orders, with the remaining 20% allocated to spot capacity on the day
• Growth of the business by 25% in customer terms since start of the solution operational use – along with a considerable reduction in the team effort required to build and maintain the schedule, therefore enabling a smaller planning team to run a larger operation
• Significant annual savings on operational costs achieved through:
  • increased existing own fleet utilization – with the same order volumes planned with fewer vehicles,
  • reduced mileage and therefore smaller carbon emissions
  • more efficient use of subcontractors
• Considerably improved customer service levels delivered owing to:
  • full operational transparency of the live, multi-nodal transport network - making sure that all orders are accounted for and delivered on time - with on-time into depot KPI of 85% against a 15 minute window in a period of growth
  • improved communication between operations and customers
  • ability to accommodate last minute changes in volumes from customers - and still provide robust feasible schedule and reliable service

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