Network Optimisation
As the first LogiMap module to be developed, Network Optimisation has a long and successful track record of handling large, multi-tier, national and multi-national supply chains.
LogiMap Network Optimisation aims to deliver the least-cost configuration for your supply chain while maintaining high standards of service. It analyses the many different elements of the supply chain, identifying solutions and improvements to guarantee the greatest performance and efficiency. These elements include:
- Warehousing
- Number and location of distribution nodes, such as factory warehousing, distribution centres, transhipments points and outbases
- Required capacities and configurations of warehouses in the network
- Transport
- Mix of transport modes across road, rail, air and sea
- Alternative supply side and import routing strategies
- Primary transport routes including inbound, inter-warehouse and those going to customer warehouses
- Mix of secondary transport routes including cross border, transhipment and local market delivery
- Inventory
- Determination of which network nodes should be stocking points and which products should be stocked there
- Inventory impacts from different numbers of stocking centres
- Rules for ongoing inventory deployment strategies.
LogiMap is able to handle product flows through complex networks and suggest configurations that could revolutionise your logistics operation. It achieves this through its innovative grouping of products into logistically similar product groups, identifying pertinent characteristics that determine how a product flows through a network. These characteristics include:
- Speed of movement – ABC Pareto classification by order lines / units / value
- Weight – high weight / low weight
- Cube – high cube / low cube
- Special handling requirements e.g. hazardous goods
- Market segmentation
- Service level.
LogiMap can handle thousands of product groups representing hundreds of thousands of products, utilising great power and flexibility in routing logistically similar products. By using a highly scalable database, LogiMap can then analyse the extremely large numbers of shipments and products found in the world’s largest organisations. This analysis can then be used to optimise processes across your entire network.
Building on this analysis, LogiMap can then be used to record objectives and constraints, which may include required service levels, lead times or warehouse capacities. This allows you to model both unconstrained and real-world constrained solutions, which can be compared and contrasted to see which delivers the best value to your organisation. When combined with LogiMap’s in-built scenario management capabilities, this allows you to evaluate a range of options and calculate the cost justifications for each one.
One of the most powerful features of Network Optimisation is LogiMap’s customised costing algorithms, which allow you to tailor solutions to the modelling problem at hand. This is important because your strategic objectives will change over time. You may move from a period of cost reduction to a period of high growth with severe capacity constraints. LogiMap’s fully configurable toolsets are designed to facilitate this kind of dramatic change, adapting seamlessly to new imperatives and providing a responsive optimisation service.