Predict and Prepare

Many of ORTEC’s recent innovations were geared towards daily planning, executing, and the insights and analytics to improve those activities. As such we are excited to introduce our newest innovation in the area of strategic decision making where you predict and prepare for the future.

The domain of predictable, strategic routing is obviously not new. Many companies leverage territories, assigned order days, and even fixed master routes to run their business. The benefits of this predictable, stable setup range from increased driver performance, since they are familiar with the areas and their customers, to increased customer service, by having a familiar driver show up who knows exactly how to operate within the customers’ four walls. We even see increased retention as a result of this familiarity.

The challenge has always been to keep the fixed plans aligned with your ever-changing business. As strategic routing used to be data dependent, labor intensive, and requiring of a high user skillset, it was near impossible to revisit the predictable plans often enough to keep efficiency high when the customer base is constantly evolving. We are happy to announce that these obstacles are now in the past. Welcome to the Future of Predictable Routing!

ORTEC’s Data & Analytics solution leverages a combination of world-class Machine Learning and Optimization algorithms to tackle the right business challenge at the right time. The following main characteristics make our solution stand out from the crowd:

  • Alerts & Suggestions: We will automatically identify areas of opportunity and automatically optimize these. The system will alert you when business improvements are available by showing you what business case to tackle, how to tackle it, and what the savings are.
  • Automated: Our solution automatically selects the right data for the question at hand. The automated data selection is both utilized for the automated suggestions as for any experiments you want to run. Simply select the business question you want to tackle and which part of your business to evaluate and the system will extract the required data from our historic repository.
  • Guided: Strategic routing shouldn’t be hard. Simply start by selecting the business question at hand and the tool guides you through the decision-making progress step-by-step.
  • What-if Scenarios: We understand that once experiments are optimized that you want to dissect them and make sure they fit every rule within your business. We offer the ability to do just that by allowing you to easily create and compare different scenarios. We also allow to quickly change parameters on automatically suggested scenarios. Questions like “how would fewer drivers impact working hours and customer service?” are quickly answered and can be easily compared to see all sides of the change before you make a decision.
  • Integrated: Once an experiment is complete, the improvements are seamlessly integrated into daily decision making and operations​.

Whether you are strategically preparing for future state or whether you are looking for short term improvements to your operation, ORTEC’s Data & Analytics solution has you covered. What challenges do you want to tackle first?

  • How many depots/warehouses should I have?
  • Where to position my depots/warehouses?​
  • What customer to service from what depot/warehouse?​
  • What type of assets do I need?​
  • What number of assets do I need?​
  • What resources to allocate to my drivers?​
  • Which driver to allocate to what region or customer?​
  • How to balance the workload over my drivers?​
  • What visit day to assign to my customer? ​
  • What visit frequency to assign to my customer?​