Lack of trust, intelligent IT tools and fair sharing mechanisms

or many companies, transportation planning is one of the final decisions in the logistics process. Deliveries are decided at the very end of the supply chain, both figuratively and literally speaking, usually at the factory or warehouse from where the consignment is to be collected. As a result, transport planners are focused only on transport orders from their own facility and pay no attention to shipments leaving any of the company’s other facilities. That’s exactly how things used to be at Aviko, a Dutch manufacturer of potato products with factories in six different European countries and a large number of warehouses across the continent. Up until around ten years ago, Aviko’s transport planning was organised locally, which sometimes meant delivery trucks from various sales offices following each other down the road. “From The Netherlands we regularly dispatched deliveries to the German region of Offenburg, for instance, while at the same time trucks from our French subsidiary would be driving to the Strasbourg area which just across the Rhine. Planning transportation locally exposes you to a real risk of sub-optimisation,” says Frank Scholten, transport manager at Aviko. When Aviko made a companywide switch to SAP around the turn of the millennium, it decided to centralise the transport planning too. With help from Ortec, a transport planning specialist, a control tower has been set up at the Aviko headquarters in Steenderen, The Netherlands. There, all the deliveries are planned for the whole of Europe, with the exception of local transport in Italy and Poland. “Most importantly, the Ortec platform gives us transparency. We can run several delivery plans simultaneously and immediately see the impact of any planning changes,” explains Scholten. “I’ve never calculated it precisely but I would estimate that our efficiency has increased by about ten percent. Our trucks always depart with full truck loads, just as before, but nowadays the average distance between the first and the last delivery address has been reduced. In other words, the trucks are driving fewer kilometres when less than full.”