Mastering the Dispatching Puzzle, Part 2: Load Optimization

Tony Tye

Wasted miles, wasted fuel, and time-consuming manual planning processes are some of the biggest challenges in today’s dispatching process.

We recently talked about how route optimization can help rental companies solve these challenges – but finding the fastest, most efficient path from the yard to multiple jobsites and back to the yard again is only one piece of the puzzle.

Even the most direct route isn’t helpful if the right delivery vehicles aren’t assigned to those stops. Planning a delivery at Jobsite A, a pickup at Jobsite B, a pickup at jobsite C, and another pickup at Jobsite D only works if the truck can accommodate all three machines that it’s bringing back to the yard at the same time. Dimensions and weight both come into account – not just for the rental equipment, but for the truck itself – making each route plan a complicated equation.

Managing Weight Limits and Size Restrictions for Delivery Vehicles

Do your dispatchers have a mental note of what each machine in your rental fleet weighs? What about the capacity of each delivery vehicle? Or – in the more likely scenario – are they working off rough approximations and educated guesses? And are they running these calculations in seconds in between other tasks on a long to-do list?

Flatbeds, trailers, lowboys, step-decks…the planning process becomes even more challenging if you have multiple types of vehicles in your delivery fleet. Same with a diverse rental inventory. If you could end up hauling a generator, a boom lift, and a front-end loader on a single run, your plan needs to account for a wide variety of weights and dimensions.

InTempo CTX puts an end to running these calculations manually. When adding new assets to your rental fleet, we pre-populate most manufacturer specifications; you confirm that the weights and dimensions match the equipment you own. From there, the route planner references this data to determine which machines should be loaded onto which trucks. You can make individual adjustments as needed, and the algorithm adapts to those changes over time.

Together with route optimization, this approach has helped CTX users:

• Eliminate their backlog of pickup requests in as little as one day

• Reduce their planning time by more than 50 percent

• Improve their on-time performance and fleet ROI

A shorter, simpler planning process makes it much easier to get the right equipment to the right place at the right time – every single day.

Take the Manual Work Out of Load Optimization

Ready to stop working the mental puzzle of route and load optimization every time you plan a new batch of pickups and deliveries? Let Connected Transport do the heavy lifting for you. Request a demo and see just how easy equipment dispatching can be with InTempo CTX.