FMCG sector – RouteOpt™ 

FMCG sector is one of the world's largest FMCG companies, operating since 1929. It has 6 factories and over 20 thousand suppliers throughout Turkey. Due to the requirements of the FMCG industry, FMCG sector attaches great importance to the efficient and cost-effective planning of supply chain planning.

Project objectives

•    Working on the mid-mile problem from warehouses to stores and planning this process in the most efficient way.

•    Automated and dynamical vehicle routes in order to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Obstacles and Challenges

•    Dynamically integrating the differentiated opening and closing hours of the stores where the products will be delivered.

•    Irradical positioning of some delivery points.

•    Integration of vehicle capacities and dimensional differentiation of products (pallets) to be loaded on vehicles into RouteOpt™ 

•    Creating an interactive tracking interface where routes and vehicles are tracked, distances traveled and carbon emissions are displayed.

SmartOpt's RouteOpt™ solution was used in route planning and optimization with the aim of reducing the total distance covered, which was reported as a "Key Performance Indicator", taking into account map and live traffic information.

Contributions by SmartOpt

•    Routes of deliveries to be made from FMCG sector's warehouses to stores were created automatically and dynamically.

•    While maintaining the number of daily deliveries, the number of vehicles needed was saved by enabling vehicles to be used with higher efficiency, and the vehicle cost was reduced.

•    Thanks to the optimized routes, the total daily distance traveled has been reduced, and accordingly, fuel costs and carbon emissions have been reduced.

Vehicle capacities and orders to be delivered to stores were received from FMCG sector. Within the scope of the study, deliveries to be made from a warehouse in Fethiye region were routed for 6 days (Monday-Saturday). As a first step, it has been shown that improvement is possible on the routes created by FMCG sector by simply changing the visit order of the customers on the routes, without making any changes in the number of routes and the customers on the routes. The RouteOpt™  solution was then applied for 6 days with the data obtained from FMCG sector, as the results obtained showed a significant improvement in terms of the total daily distance traveled. As a result of this study, in addition to shortening the total distance traveled, the number of daily routes was also reduced. To sum up, it was seen that using the RouteOpt™  solution in route planning for FMCG sector would allow financial savings in both fuel and vehicle costs. At the same time, thanks to the digital transformation of the routing process, it was observed that it would make a great contribution to FMCG sector's analysis by enabling the tracking and reporting of vehicles/deliveries.