Do you want to eliminate uncertainty from your trip planning?

The solution: Predict first and calculate later

As a transport planner, you are continuously confronted with the gap between your well-planned intentions and the harsh reality of execution. Every day brings new challenges… from customers who don’t stick to the agreements, to traffic conditions that test your drivers’ skills to the limit. Such challenges not only cost money, but also create uncertainty in your trip planning. All this upheaval forces you to spend all your time on fire-fighting rather than on addressing the underlying issues.

Pre-trip improvements

Most people are aware that our SaaS platform analyses a wide range of logistics data, enabling you to closely monitor the execution of your transport operations and intervene to optimise them (in real time) if necessary. But did you know that our platform not only offers post-trip reporting, including insights into incidents and their causes, but can also provide in-depth insights into likely disruptions during the day ahead, even before a single mile has been completed? In other words, it can show you whether you will be in the black or the red at the end of the day!

Besides our complete platform, we offer user-friendly tools that allow you to regularly validate and check your trip planning. By conducting a check in advance, you gain insight into the expected travel times, the speed – i.e. whether the traffic will flow smoothly – and the distances associated with your planned trips. Together, these predictive insights form a ‘digital twin’, mirroring your real-world transport chain in near-real time. This digital twin saves users a huge amount of time they would otherwise spend on searching for, correlating and analysing data. Now, you can see at a glance whether your carefully planned trip schedule is feasible before you start executing it. Therefore, you have an immediate indication of whether you can comply with your contractual agreements by meeting supply chain KPIs, SLAs and other parameters.

Dealing with uncertainty

These pre-trip insights are obtained thanks to predictive analytics based on various sources of logistics data and real-time data combined with historical data. The historical data is derived from a feedback loop of your previous trips. After all, it is important to know whether the problems that occurred in the past could have been predicted, and whether the measures taken to solve them were effective. Based on these insights, you can assess whether there are ways to reduce uncertainty and whether previous solutions were the right ones.

“Ideally, every trip always goes according to plan and every end customer receives their deliveries as agreed. We realise that trip planning can never be 100% accurate, but we strive for at least 95% reliability. The last 5% will always vary due to unpredictability during execution.”

(Jan Leensen, Jumbo Supermarket Online)

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Continuous feedback loop

The pre-trip insights enable you to adjust your transport planning to create a realistic schedule. This schedule is then monitored during the actual execution of the trips, followed by post-trip analysis. This creates a continuous feedback loop, supporting adjustments and improvements to future trip schedules for ever-better performance. As a result, the efficiency of your transport planning improves significantly, leading to time savings, cost savings, lower carbon emissions and, ultimately, a better customer experience. Moreover, any changes made – including the reasoning behind them – can be communicated directly to all stakeholders in your supply chain if necessary.

Improved trip planning

Simacan can support effective and realistic trip planning by providing advance insights into the impact and costs associated with likely disruptions. This keeps planners better prepared for challenges and uncertainties. By using a continuous feedback loop filled with ever-more information, Simacan facilitates the continuous optimisation of trip schedules, enabling more efficiency, cost savings and carbon reductions. Thanks to Simacan, you no longer have to allow an extra margin for uncertainty when planning trips.

Want to know more? Then contact us.