City Deliveries Approach

City delivery planning is affected by truck requirements (e.g cold or open trucks), customer timing, unloading bay, customer location waiting time (to handover goods), customer location and truck capacity constraints.

A few checks on current routing and capacity of your delivery trucks should yield some opportunities:

1. Check utilization rates of the trucks. Due to historical reasons, some drivers/delivery assistants may focus on delivering to some customers. You can certainly use underutilized trucks to deliver more in one trip. Delivery reach time constraints? Use an assistant and/or do not promise a specific arrival time for customer.

2. Do same trucks go to the same location that can be served by a bigger truck, or better still, do the same trucks have ample capacity that can deliver for all locations. Delivery reach time constraint? Use an assistant and/or do not promise a specific arrival time for customer.

3. Dynamic deliveries due to not being able to control orders? Make sure that these customers are high margin customers. If not, better set cut off times for orders and processing to be done so that delivery routes can be planned to be as economically as possible.

4. Even for highly utilized trucks, are there established procedures for delivery coordinator quickly check available capacity on trucks and consolidate deliveries for days when delivery volumes reduce?


An independent approach to systematically overcome these constraints are as below:
1. Tackle truck requirements, customer timing, unloading bay size, and waiting time to handover goods first. Cluster all your customer timing delivery and unloading bay size constraint points. Use the biggest trucks possible to serve these points. Use next biggest truck of you are not able to serve the locations after factoring time to move to location and waiting time to handover goods. Base on the space available after delivering to timing stores, use space filling curve algorithm to send to the next nearest store.

2. If you cannot meet delivery times after doing #1, use smaller trucks for those delivery points with long waiting times for handover of goods to customer. These smaller trucks may allow you to go straight into carparks and deliver from there rather than from congested loading bays that contribute to long handover time for goods. Alternatively, consider using additional staff. Due to unloading bay constraints, time to handover goods may be significantly shorter with 2 staff.

3. Tackle customers with no delivery timing constraints. For rest of the stores with no timing constraints, use the biggest trucks and space filling curve to route to customers with similar loading bay constraints. Then the next sized trucks.

This approach assumes that it is marginally cheaper to serve another customer at a different delivery point using the same truck, than using the smallest truck possible to do many to and for deliveries from a distribution centre.

Of course, there are also considerations like driving another truck to take back the cold truck at a customer premises and routing from truck capacity limitations.