Transportation Planning

An organization’s transportation network is the arteries which enable the flow of material across the entire supply chain. A well run transportation network goes a long way in improving the overall health of the supply chain. Traditionally, transport planning was an activity which did not receive much attention in the overall scheme of things. But with increasing pressure to cut costs companies are now finding that a structured approach to transportation can yield rich dividends.

Harapa’s transportation solutions leverage the expertise of deep domain expertise in this area to deliver best-of-breed decision making ability to our customers.

Route Planning

At a tactical level, organizations often need to decide the best way to transport material throughout their supply chain be it from their suppliers to factories or from warehouses to retailers. A number of factors such as vehicle capacity constraints, route costs, delivery frequency, etc need to be considered while designing routes.

Some of the challenges faced while making such decisions are:

• What is the best mode of transport between two locations?
• What is the best route to take to reach from one location to another?
• How can I achieve on-time delivery with minimum cost?
• How can I decrease the time required to transport material?
• What happens to my transportation network if demand increases or supply is affected?

Harapa’s Route Planning solution is designed to solve specific problems related to transportation. Our solution reduces overall transportation costs by identifying a set of master routes after taking into account various constraints. Harapa’s solution also ensures that your optimal routes remain optimal by undertaking dynamic re-evaluation of the routes.

It keeps you informed if a particular route is no longer optimal due to certain events. Harapa’s advanced simulation and modeling features allow users to run various “what-if” scenarios to see changes in network performance.

Benefits of Harapa Route Planning:

• Reduced overall transport distance and times.
• Reduced transport costs
• Increased asset utilization.
• Improved service levels
• Faster response to demand fluctuations

Vehicle Routing

Organizations making daily deliveries to multiple customers from multiple locations often face a tough challenge in determining the best combination of vehicle-route-customer to reduce overall cost and time for service. Decision making in such cases is usually done randomly with reliance on experience. Additionally such planning is complicated by the presence of different complicating factors like:

• Vehicle capacities
• Time windows to serve customer sites
• Incompatibility between certain customer sites and fleet vehicles
• Operations involving pick-up and deliveries on the same route
• Operations involving backhauls
• Last minute customer orders
• Dynamic events like traffic jams

Harapa’s vehicle routing solution leverages the power of computing and advanced algorithms to solve the vehicle routing problem within a practical timeframe. Our platform allows you to react to realtime events like traffic jams or last minute orders and dynamically re-route vehicles. All this is supported by a Geo-spatial Information System (GIS) interface which lets users see the routes on a map along with all the relevant locations and also allows drag/dropping of routes to create new ones.

Benefits of Harapa Vehicle Routing solution:

• Increased service levels
• Increase in on-time deliveries
• Ability to react to realtime events
• Improved asset utilization

Load Planning

One of the important tasks of the transportation process is determining the optimal load configuration or the optimal way of loading vehicles before dispatch. The aim is to make the best use of available resources in the form of vehicle space. This task is complicated by the presence of loads of different weights, sizes and shapes.

Harapa load planning solution uses advanced algorithms to determine the best load configuration for a given shipment. It also allows organizations to analyze delivery requirements and evaluate if LTL shipments can be converted into FTL thereby reducing transportation costs.

Benefits of Harapa Load Planning:

• Maximize loading space utilization and reduce costs by determining optimal load configuration for pallets, containers and railcars.
• Leverage load consolidation to aggregate customer demand which can be serviced by a single vehicle.
• Reduce / eliminate LTL shipments by consolidating smaller shipments into full truckloads.