Every day, millions of transportation vehicles and field representatives are operating suboptimally. The reason: hundreds of companies underestimate the economic importance of optimised round-scheduling. The result: companies damage their customer relationship by failing to keep appointments and waste time and money every day.
Round-scheduling often gets mixed up with route-planning. Optimal route-planning is easy to calculate and is nowadays available everywhere in the form of navigation devices. The significantly higher potential for optimisation lies in the scheduling of rounds. The most important question is: Which vehicle or which employee gets which jobs in what order?
Optimal scheduling of ten appointments a day for an employee sound like an easy task. However, even at this scale there are more than 3.6 million possible route variations. Until recently, no algorithm could be found to provide an exact solution to this kind of task in an acceptable calculation time. The problem with all common procedures: the results are either only slightly better than manually planned solutions or the calculation times are too high.
After about 15 years of experience and research, FLS has developed an innovative algorithm, which immensely accelerates the calculation processes. For the first time, staff plans, appointment- and round-schedules can be optimised in real-time while taking into account a variety of different parameters – with exceptionally high accuracy and solution quality.
PowerOpt today makes FLS the clear technology leader in the area of round-scheduling. For you, this means a cost reduction of up to 20 % compared to manual planning and up to 10 % cost reduction compared to a computer-assisted tour planning from other manufacturers.
