Large LTL carriers spend hundreds of millions of dollars in linehaul costs each year. HaulPLAN’s optimized load plans and schedules can reduce a carrier’s linehaul costs by 2% – 5% annually.
HaulPLAN can reduce the number of service errors for various origin-destination services, resulting in greater delivery and overall customer satisfaction.
Creating linehaul plans manually requires months of painstaking effort. HaulPLAN reduces the process to days, enabling faster and more frequent changes to plans.
Only 70% – 80% of an LTL carrier’s shipments move according to the plan, with the rest of the routings decided dynamically each day. HaulPLAN creates better linehaul forecasting so that the largest possible percentage of shipments moves according to plan.
Most LTL carriers operate reactively by dealing with hotspots on a daily basis as they show up. HaulPLAN uses historical shipment volumes to proactively create better linehaul forecasting and minimize potential hotspots.
LTL carriers user their experience and institutional knowledge to make important strategic decisions. HaulPLAN builds upon human experience and insight by adding science and data to this decision making.
HaulPLAN creates an optimized linehaul plan based on historical shipment volumes and customer service commitments. It’s a web-based decision support system that:
HaulPLAN is revolutionizing how LTL carriers create plans and optimize network operations. It can be used by linehaul planners, network planners and central dispatchers to create better linehaul schedules and shipment routes.
More advanced than the software currently used by most LTL carriers.
Unique capabilities that have been desired but unavailable until now.
We continually innovate HaulPLAN to meet your evolving business needs so that it will be the software of choice for LTL carriers for decades to come.
Simulation-guided optimization is at the heart of HaulPLAN. It’s a proprietary technique developed by Optym through decades of R&D and is ideal for solving complex planning and scheduling problems
For a given load plan, this technique simulates the movement of shipments on a time-space network created by linehaul schedules. It then determines their complete routings from origin to destination. Through this simulation, we determine the cost and service quality of the given load plan. HaulPLAN repeatedly modifies this plan, evaluates it with respect to cost and service quality and keeps the most effective plan.
This process is repeated until the load plan is in its optimal state and can no longer be improved.
HaulPLAN has four optimization modes. These modes enable an LTL carrier to engage in a constant process of improving its linehaul plan and continuously adapting to changing shipment volumes and service commitments.
Make selective changes to a given plan and evaluate the impact of these changes. You can delete a load, add a load or change the load plan of a service.
Do a clean-sheet optimization of the entire linehaul plan. HaulPLAN makes changes as needed to reduce linehaul costs and improve service quality. The scope of optimization can be controlled to make plan changes only in specific regions of the network.
Generate the best changes to improve cost and service. You can specify the number and types of changes you would like to see, and HaulPLAN will generate these recommendations.
Upgrade some terminals to hubs or downgrade some terminals to end-of-lines. You can also change processing capacities and generate a new load plan to study the effectiveness of your changes.
HaulPLAN can consider multiple product types (e.g., expedited or economy) with different service levels.
It prioritizes the loading of shipments at terminals based on product types.
Shipment volumes vary by day of the week, with Mondays and Fridays often being the heaviest. HaulPLAN creates plans and schedules that change by the day of the week and keep the linehaul cost at a minimum.
Each terminal can have a time window that permits different types of operations – for example, inbound operations, outbound operations, breakbulk operations, etc. These time windows can be set individually for each day of the week.
HaulPLAN considers different equipment types operating on different parts of the network; some lanes may use single van, while some may use two pups and others may use three pups. HaulPLAN supports weight and cube based trailer capacities.
Relay operations are critical for some LTL carriers to reduce their linehaul costs. HaulPLAN incorporates relay operations while creating linehaul plans.
HaulPLAN can recommend an optimized plan for both road and rail purchased transportation, providing additional opportunity to save costs and reduce network imbalance and empty movements.
With HaulPLAN, you can perform a variety of what-if studies and identify opportunities to reduce linehaul costs and improve service quality.
HaulPLAN helps you perform a clean-slate optimization and choose the appropriate recommendations. Not all recommendations may be implementable due to reasons not modeled in HaulPLAN.
Find the best incremental improvements in the current load plan, considering both the linehaul cost and service errors. You can control the number of changes and their scope (terminal, region or the entire network).
HaulPLAN provides the capability to trade off between linehaul cost and service quality. You can perform studies to reduce costs in various ways, such as improving service quality by running extra linehaul schedules.
Origin-destination shipment volumes and densities can have strong seasonality. HaulPLAN periodically optimizes your load, rail and purchased transportation plans.
HaulPLAN allows you to make manual changes to the current load plan, such as adding loads, deleting loads or changing purchased or rail transportation options. Assess their impacts before pushing them into production.
Using HaulPLAN, you can perform studies to assess the impact of opening, closing, upgrading or downgrading terminals, as well as changing shipment processing capacities of hub locations.
