A cloud platform for mobile workforces is releasing its advanced route optimisation to help fleets cope with Auckland’s severe traffic problems.
Founded by Sam Morgan in 2011, vWork is a cloud-based mobile workforce enterprise platform located in Auckland.
It has more than 170 business clients in over 30 countries, including Toll Holdings, McCarthy Transport and The Warehouse Group.
Director and majority shareholder, Morgan, says it is a game changer for fleets looking to combat Auckland’s congestion, which destroys business margins, “not to mention the mental health of professional drivers.”
Work chief executive Brendon Petrich says: “Advanced Route Optimisation allows dispatchers to enter all the work they need to do that day — pick-ups, deliveries, and service calls — and then our algorithms will define the most efficient set of run-sheets for their drivers.
“Our analysis shows that fleets whic
h schedule jobs manually spend 20% more time on the road than they need to — simply because the complexity of scheduling thousands of jobs across hundreds of vehicles is beyond any human,” Petrich says.
The platform takes into account a driver’s working hours, skills and vehicle capabilities and then computes thousands of possible routes to accomplish the most work in the least possible time.
Operators can choose to reduce total time on the road, or to do more work with their existing resources without having to put more vehicles on the road.
“While we’ve built the optimisation platform to be useful to any transport operator, it’s particularly useful for companies using hub and spoke approaches, such as courier firms,” Petrich says.
“It is also applicable to those people with lots of stops on the single daily run such as delivery, install, service and maintenance operators,” he says.
Morgan adds, “Our goal is to bring the advanced technology that is available to the big guys — Uber, Amazon, FedEx — to smaller operators who could never afford to build this sort of technology themselves.”
“And if we can get more vans and trucks off the road in Auckland during the day too, then that would be great.”
How does it work?
The vWork online optimisation tool matches delivery schedules against capacity and constraints to build the most efficient programmes. This means you can do more work in less time, or with fewer trucks.
The tool takes into account a driver’s hours, skills, locations and available capacity to create a set of routes that accomplishes the most amount of work in the least possible time.
It has the ability to allocate work to the fewest number of workers and maximise the efficiency of your workforce, and sort work by type, range, tags and customers.
You can focus solely on the work that needs to be addressed first, or select the time range of jobs by the hour or day to create custom time ranges that suit your customers and workers best.
The application is simple, just draw a fence around jobs on the map and select your resources — the tool does the rest. Small optimisations take seconds to run. Larger optimisations will run in the background, allowing you to continue creating other optimisations.
Operators can also use it to work out how to use fewer trucks or workers to fulfil a given set of work in a defined timeframe.
Usage so far has indicated average efficiency gains of around 20%.
More accurate route planning with vWork also allows you to send ETA alerts to your customers automatically.
According to Morgan, using the vWork optimisation tool will reduce fuel usage, increase efficiency, and reduces time dispatchers spend planning routes and runs and assigning jobs to vehicles.
