Transport managers and milk hauliers are finding new ways to run milk collection planning and transport more efficiently. Ensuring transportation operations are making the most efficient use of vehicles, fuel and drivers is a top priority. Here are some tips that will help you to achieve that goal.
Automate route planning.
Routing optimisation software can significantly reduce costs by analysing the day to day constraints your milk collection operation faces.
What-if scenarios.
Modelling the consequences of changing factors such as number of vehicles, supplier pools and factory requirements helps you make decisions before investing time and resources to see the results.
Evaluate optimisation settings.
Milk production, truck waiting times and levels of congestion usually change over time. Fine-tuning your operation is important to keep fuel and transport costs to a minimum.
Use accurate data to maximise efficiency.
Milk collection planning requires consideration of a large number of unique parameters relating to suppliers, farms, factories and vehicles. This approach enables optimised routing and scheduling while taking the appropriate constraints into account.
Manually add your own data.
Industry standard mapping platforms are often incomplete, especially when it comes to planning routes for trucks. Complementing your automated route plans with local knowledge about unsuitable roads and farm access restrictions increases optimisation accuracy and reduces risk of knowledge loss.
Identify opportunities for improvement.
With ‘actual data’ collected from vehicle tracking devices, transport managers can identify and improve driver and vehicle utilisation to keep operation costs and carbon emissions down.
Consider all factors affecting your transport costs.
Vehicle weight can have a huge impact on fuel consumption levels. Heavier loads consume more fuel, so distances travelled should be optimised based on truck load. Driving time, waiting time, total distance, the number and types of trucks also play an important role in cost calculations. It is important to analyse all factors.
Review your progress.
Record and collect historical plans. You can use this data to review the planning process, uncover areas for improvement and identify trends in your transport operations.
To read more interesting perspectives on milk collection planning and transport feel free to review our other blog posts.