Planning when to take the order is important to group deliveries
Perishable goods companies need to plan regular delivery runs to get stock to customers.
- Customers order normally on a regular cycle - it may be weekly, by weekly, monthly, daily etc.
- Telesales - there is a telesales cycle at the customer level including preferred day and frequency.
- Sales Rep - there is a sales rep visit cycle at the customer level including preferred day and frequency.
- Deliveries normally follow sales orders with a day or two delay
Hence customers need to be clustered for their order cycle with a reference to the possible delivery dates and times - so this determines the order cycles for the customers.
- The desire is to ensure the customer runs out of all stock around the same time - this helps to consolidate all required items onto a single delivery and reduces "urgent" deliveries. The system proposes an order based on individual SKU sell rates to assist in reducing deliveries.
- Not all customers order each time on the regular cycle - the order may be too small to avoid a delivery fee or sales may have been affected by some issue.
Some customers can order anytime and not affect your deliveries
- Some customers are not delivered to by you - so they can order anytime as they will not affect your delivery planning (they will affect the warehouse however)
- Some customers take up entire delivery vehicles and hence can be delivered on any day (they will use a vehicle and reduce capacity to deliver other customers)
Planning your delivery vehicles
After contacting customers there will be a group of orders that need to be delivered by you
- Each vehicle has limited capacity
- Each vehicle can only be used for one run at a time
- Each order has a volume / storage requirements (eg needs refrigeration)
- Each order has an address to be delivered to
In order to group the orders and make sensible delivery runs