When planning, you want to deliver items cheaply, quickly, and honor the requirements of your customer.
The following strategies are used to accomplish these delivery planning goals.
Consolidation of items into a shipment
It is often more efficient to ship several items from an order in one shipment. If all of the items are being shipped to the same location, it often cheaper to ship them together in a single shipment.
Consolidation of shipments into a load
Shipments can be batched together in a single load that is transported by the carrier. When consolidating shipments into a load, many factors should be considered:
- possible routes
- available carriers
- freight capacity of the carriers
- special requirements of either intermediate nodes or the customer
For example, there could be a low cost bulk carrier available, but the containers that are used by that carrier are too large for the receiving dock of the customer.
Optimize routing
Depending on the circumstances, different routing strategies can be used to optimize delivery time and delivery costs. In some situations, a direct route from the sender is best. In other cases, picking up multiple shipments, and delivering them to single destination makes the most sense.
The following figure illustrates some of the most common delivery route scenarios, to give you a sense of the wide range of routing strategies that can be used.
