The logistics veteran is well aware of the complexities involved in route planning from his experience at the helm of multiple innovation projects at Deutsche Post DHL Group, where he has held various roles for over 20 years. Now, with Greenplan, keeping up with technological developments along with rising consumer expectations is the greatest challenge for Beckmann and his team.
“The growth of e-commerce and changing consumer behavior is driving demand for scalable delivery solutions as well as the need for same-day and time-definite deliveries,” said Beckmann on responding to customers’ needs.
Greenplan built the tool precisely to cater for these increasing delivery complexities. It enables better prediction of estimated arrival, allowing for possible time window arrangements, and enabling priority handling services for critical shipments. Unlike other tools that use postal codes or geo-fencing to map delivery routes, Greenplan’s algorithm considers relevant factors, such as vehicle characteristics and payload restrictions, to optimize costs and fleet utilization.
But what truly sets it apart from its competition is the way the company designed the algorithm according to the true traffic flows. It calculates the routes using daytime-dependent, road-specific travel times that reflect the actual situation that drivers face on the road, even in crowded cities.
“If drivers consider the planned tours and stop sequences as unrealistic or impractical and reject them, the new route planning system won’t be successful,” explained Beckmann on the importance of user acceptance.
This method of calculation generates costs savngs of up to 20 percent compared to standard route optimization solutions, simply by reducing kilometers driven and thus lowering the carbon footprint. The speed at which the calculation can be done is also a game-changer. In the planning stage, integrating time-of-day-dependent velocities on every street segment initially slowed the algorithm's processing times.
However, thanks to the rigorous, systematic approach of Greenplan’s collaboration with the University of Bonn, the algorithm's processing time was lowered significantly. It now uses 70 percent less computing time than standard tools. Likewise, Greenplan also offers rapid and flexible updates - a crucial feature for route optimization tools. By housing all map data in a single database, the tool is less rigid and can respond to changes efficiently unlike older systems or tools.
“Short-term changes or certain error corrections can be implemented in fast updates without long waiting times. Our software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture makes global deployments as easy as local implementations,” said Beckmann.
