ORTEC, a leading provider of advanced analytics and optimization solutions, today announced its Zone Engineering Manager (ZEM), a powerful new solution designed to help organizations across distribution and logistics improve efficiency and service quality through optimized territory design, visit day scheduling, and integrated routing capabilities.

ZEM delivers a strategic layer to delivery operations, enabling businesses to proactively engineer delivery zones and schedules that align with both operational realities and customer demands. By providing planners with multiple optimization scenarios simultaneously, ZEM simplifies decision-making and supports organizations in adapting quickly to changing business conditions.

Driving Strategic Value in Delivery Operations
ZEM addresses critical challenges faced by distribution networks by creating efficient, clustered groups of customers and balancing workloads across resources, such as drivers. Its map-based clustering and polygon selection features allow planners to quickly adjust territories and keep drivers working in familiar areas. This ensures customer-driver relationships are maintained from one planning period to the next, improving both efficiency and service continuity.

The solution also generates visit-day proposals driven by key performance indicators – including working time, distance, number of visits, and load volume (weight) – helping companies evaluate trade-offs and select the best-fit schedules. ZEM is designed to handle a wide variance in customer contracts, delivery frequencies, and visit schemes, providing the flexibility needed to meet diverse operational requirements. By seamlessly integrating with daily routing systems, strategic territory designs flow directly into live execution.

Scenario planning capabilities further strengthen decision-making, allowing organizations to run “what-if” simulations when expanding into new markets, merging customer networks, or adjusting visit frequencies. The testing of these scenarios in advance empowers planners to better understand the impact of changes and implement the most cost-effective and service-friendly path forward.

Optimization for Measurable Results
By aligning territory design with operational realities, ORTEC’s Zone Engineering Manager helps companies improve efficiency by minimizing travel time and balancing workloads across drivers. It enhances service quality by establishing optimized delivery schedules that reflect demand patterns, while reducing costs through smarter territory design and better fleet utilization. ZEM also provides agility by allowing planners to test and compare multiple scenarios, giving organizations the foresight to anticipate and prepare for change.

ZEM is part of ORTEC’s cloud-native SaaS on Microsoft Azure with high availability, API/webhook integrations, and enterprise support under the ORTEC Cloud SLA, operating within a secured environment to meet IT and compliance standards.

End-to-End Implementation with ORTEC Expertise
As part of ORTEC’s logistics optimization suite, ZEM is designed for flexible deployment and seamless integration with existing logistics planning and execution systems. Its intuitive interface ensures planners can be trained quickly, enabling faster adoption and immediate impact on operations.

Already tested by leading distributors, ZEM has demonstrated its value in improving delivery territory design and scheduling efficiency. By empowering planners to make smarter, data-driven decisions, ORTEC continues to provide solutions that give companies a competitive edge in cost control and customer service.

“Delivery operations require both tactical foresight and day-to-day efficiency,” said Bryan Kuiper, Product Manager at ORTEC. “With the Zone Engineering Manager, we’re giving our customers the tools to strategically design delivery territories and schedules that reduce costs while elevating service quality.”

Powered by Generative Artificial Intelligence
A unique feature of ZEM is the addition of an AI Chatbot that assists the planner in creating a tactical plan. “We wanted to step away from historic solutions where planners would have to tune complex technical parameters and settings to build a solution via trial and error,” said Kuiper. “Instead, we decided that a planner should simply be able to describe his or her preferences via natural language, and the system should translate that into the right solution.” The AI Assistant adds another level of user friendliness to the system and allows for very quick onboarding, reduced manual fine-tuning, and better solutions in the end.