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

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