We all complain of the atrocious traffic situation in our towns and cities. Consider the logistics nightmare that exists for companies that have made delivering their or others' goods their core business.

Sending out a fleet of vehicles every day to do deliveries is a mammoth task. If planners give drivers too few ports of call, the drivers and vehicles end up back at the depot wasting time and money; if they have too many stops to make, some goods will be late or only delivered the next day.

OPSI Systems was founded in 1997 as an IT consulting and software company by a few academics from Wits to apply mathematics to solve this problem of routing, scheduling, management and tracking of vehicle fleets. The company developed its own logistics software to complement off-the-shelf applications and today helps about 140 corporations streamline their fleet logistics, claiming to be able to save between 10% and 20% on their current logistics costs.

OPSI managing director, David Lubinsky, says the company's mission is "to design, construct and deliver scalable fleet logistics software that optimises all aspects of our customers' supply chain".



Using technology such as GPS, the company has made vehicle tracking simpler and more effective, allowing organisations to keep exact tabs on where vehicles are at all times. This saves businesses money by allowing them to make full use of their vehicles at all times.



OPSI in the real world

The Imperial Logistics warehouse in Clayville is an important place for the people of Gauteng. It is from there that many of the liquors and beers that we drink are distributed. At the moment, Imperial handle three liquor distribution principals.

The three order streams each come from separate ERP systems. These need to be merged into a single stream for routing and scheduling and then the routes are split into three again and sent back to the ERP systems. To do this, a pre-processor was created to merge the order streams and a post-processor splits the routes again and sends them back to each system.

In order to make the picking operation as smooth as possible, FLO (FLO is an OPSI vehicle scheduling system designed to improve fleet utilisation and reduce delivery costs) produces picking slips per route per principal so that each route can be completely picked with one visit to each SKU.

One of the big challenges was making sure that each outlet is visited at the same time each week. The first problem was to make sure that outlets from the customer master files of the three principals correspond. There is no standardisation of customer numbers and the customer names will not necessarily or even usually match. For example, Makro Ultra Liquor Wadeville might also appear as Wadeville Macro, or Ultra Liquor Wadeville, or Makro Ultra and so on. A first work through the data identified about half of the corresponding outlets. To find the rest, we wrote a report that listed all outlets within a kilometre of each other and allowed the operator to link the customers from each principal to the same delivery point.

The second problem is to ensure that all orders for each outlet only come in on one day of the week. This involved an initial nominated delivery day study to allocate each outlet to a specific day. The idea was that each principal would change delivery days to conform to these new nominated delivery days, but this has proved to be an ongoing challenge.

The manager of the warehouse, Gerald Field, said: "FLO solved the problem of combining orders from different principals to the same customer, both from a warehouse picking, as well as an optimal routing of the combined orders on the distribution side of the business. We were able to go live with the system on extremely tight deadlines".

For more information contact Dan Palay, OPSI Systems, dan@opsi.co.za