Skip to main content
Home | What we do | Use cases

Planning 300 shipments in 8 minutes: Decision Intelligence for a major food group’s logistics

A routing algorithm integrated with the company’s ERP that cuts planning time by 50% and saves €60,000 a year on transport.
Markets
Solutions

The challenge

A major international food group faced daily complexity in planning 200–300 full truckload (FTL) trips from around 30 depots to more than 600 delivery points. Planners had to build a minimum-cost plan by hand in just 90 minutes, based on 350–400 daily orders, with peaks above 600. The problem involved significant combinatorial complexity: it required factoring in the geographical compatibility of points, loading and delivery time windows, vehicle capacity, and the option of shipping optional inter-depot restocking orders. On top of this came critical operational constraints, such as multi-pick and multi-drop sequences governed by LIFO logic and the need to position heavy loads near the tractor unit. The goal was to standardise the planning process and cut calculation times to just a few minutes, while maintaining high fleet utilisation

How we create value

Optit responded by developing a customised “pickup & delivery” routing algorithm, integrated directly with the company’s ERP (SAP ECC) and implemented within the Planning module of our OptiLogistics enterprise software.

Delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, it automatically breaks the overall problem down into territorial sub-problems to optimise computation. The calculation engine maps operational constraints, translating them into economic penalties built into an advanced objective function. Rather than simply minimising the hard costs of mileage and stops, this function also balances the quality of matches between origin and destination.

Through an intuitive web interface, planners can launch automatic optimisation, review summary KPIs and mapping, make real-time manual adjustments, and export approved trips back to the ERP quickly and efficiently.

Impact

  • A 50% cut in planning time: the algorithm calculates trips in just 8 minutes.
  • Estimated cost savings of €60,000 a year on transport spend.
  • Fewer total kilometres driven and optimised numbers of intermediate stops.
  • Standardised processes and shorter onboarding times for planners (a job rotation of 3 out of 4 planners completed within 1 month).
Planning 300 shipments in 8 minutes: Decision Intelligence for a major food group’s logistics