Network Planning
LogiMap Network Planning delivers an innovative approach to operational planning. Our approach isn’t fixated on clever mathematics or statistical forecasts. Instead, it reflects the real-world events that drive business volumes from period to period across rolling operating years. This means that clients can build robust long-term plans that dynamically adapt to short-term challenges.
The advantages of our approach to network planning may best be understood by comparison with conventional planning methods. Product replenishment planning, for instance, focuses on short-term issues informed by statistics that may prove inflexible in the face of unexpected problems. This type of planning is characterised by:
- Use of statistical methods to predict short term demand for individual products based on patterns of historic demand
- Reliance on event-based approaches for products that have some kind of process driven demand e.g. the need to provide spare parts to support regular and predictable service cycles
- Typically dependent on the periodic product replenishment and reordering cycle in the short term in weekly and monthly cycles.
Similarly, typical approaches to budgetary forecasting can also prove detrimental to your wider logistics operation. These conventional methods face the following issues:
- Usually driven by the Finance function, rather than the actual logistical needs of your organisation
- Often starts with financial objectives that are then translated into operational volumes for supply chain planning. This doesn’t take sufficient account of issues at the ground level
- May necessarily ignore important drivers of operational cost from different product handling characteristics
- Often have a basis in financial accounting, with poor support for collecting costs at activity level
These traditional planning methods often promote historical trends and financial imperatives above the actual needs of logistics operations. Such a top down approach can have a detrimental long-term effect on your logistics performance and efficiency. Instead, you need an approach firmly rooted in the realities of logistics networks and the changing conditions on the ground.
LogiMap Network Planning
Our approach to logistics network planning focuses on those events that have a real, significant and often predictable effect on forward volumes. Examples of these events include:
- Warehouse openings and closures
- Retail store openings and closures
- Distribution boundary changes e.g. changing a distribution centre’s delivery area
- Business acquisitions and disposals
- Changes in customer service level agreements e.g. from weekly to daily delivery or from 5 to 7 day delivery
- Major promotions
- Push based distributions e.g. load balancing distributions pre Christmas
- Changes in market conditions requiring uplifting or downgrading volume forecasts by different amounts geographically.
LogiMap Network Planning allows all of these events to be recorded with full commentaries and then added to or subtracted from the plan at the click of a button. The resulting composite forecasts can then be viewed graphically and unlimited numbers of alternative scenarios can be modelled. This means you can build accurate, comprehensive pictures of everything from best and worst case scenarios to the most likely outcome, and so on. With this information in hand, you’re well placed to deal with future issues and adapt to sudden fluctuations across the network.
The plan can be amended and shared between a group of users at different locations as is the case with all our web-based tools. Each user’s changes are logged with a commentary, so that a full audit trail of changes to the plan is always available. Plans can also be maintained at individual locations and summarised at cross-company level, making your network planning more manageable.
LogiMap Manpower Planning
Effective manpower planning is essential in improving performance and efficiency. The key to making sure that you have right people in place across a complex network is to understand first what your overall forecasted network volumes are and second how these volumes translate into work for a particular distribution centre.
Building such an understanding can be difficult given the many small issues that can affect a logistics operation. For example, network volumes can be affected by primary transport route changes, delivery area changes and many other variations across a network. Each slight change will shape the mix of work in affected distribution centres.
A good example of this variation is in pick and pack activities, which are typically the biggest consumers of manpower. The nature of these activities is heavily dependent on the mix of outbound loads, whether they are for multi-drop customer delivery, full load delivery or delivery via another transhipment centre where pallets may be cross docked. Fluctuations in the type of load can therefore have a big impact on manpower demand, meaning that you need a planning system that can forecast and adapt to changes in the network.
LogiMap Manpower Planning integrates built-in understanding of network flows with a range of work measurements to accurately forecast manning levels for each distribution centre function. Plans can take into account various allowances, including the type of staff (permanent, contract or agency), holiday leave, sickness, training and other indirect activities. This results in planning that incorporates every conceivable contingency, meaning you’re never left short in times of high demand.
When combined with the LogiMap Network Planning module, Manpower Planning provides a powerful means of forecasting overall network volumes which can then be automatically translated into detailed manpower plans. LogiMap simplifies the planning process, delivering a responsive service that makes networks adaptive, effective and efficient.