Optimizing a route with Field Service Management tools

Learn how Globema's optimization tools helped this retail company achieve their business goals.

Challenge

A retail company wanted to complete a series of works including controlling their store displays and verifying orders. The work would cover 2000 retail outlets in a timeframe of a dozen working days. To meet the requirement of such a large-scale project, the company needed to hire sales representatives. It was looking for support in estimating how many new employees it would need in order to meet the project assumptions.

The client was also looking for a way to plan an optimal task and route schedule so that the work would be done as efficiently as possible and the sales representatives wouldn’t have to make additional kilometers without necessity. It was important to reliably estimate the commuting time of sales reps to the task execution locations in order to calculate the real travel costs (sales venues were scattered throughout Poland).

Time was also a crucial factor, as the client didn’t have enough of it to build and compare the routes of its sales representatives using traditional methods. They wanted to conduct the whole process as quickly as possible and get the best possible outcome.

The company required an analysis to find out:

how many employees should be hired to conduct the audit?

what should be the locations of the newly employed sales representatives?

how should they arrange the routes to make the travel to the venues as short as possible and to maximize the work efficiency?

Solution

The customer specified his input condition: the number of venues that needed to be included when planning routes and performing route analysis. They also specified how long it should take to deliver services at each venue, how much time each employee should spend on one task, and the number of working hours.

Input conditions determined by our client

How to handle 2000 tasks (each location was to be visited only once), within 15 days, taking into consideration that the average time of a sales representative performing a task is 25 minutes and a working day is 8 hours?

Globema’s task was to find the answer to the following questions:

how many employees should the company hire?
in what locations?
how to arrange their schedules in order to carry out the project as efficiently as possible?

To conduct the analysis, we used our solutions: GeoTraxx and GeoTask Planner. They draw information from Google Maps and use it to optimize routes and plan tasks in the field. Additionally, we used FME, a platform for integrating and processing geospatial data, to determine the optimal starting locations of the sales representatives.

What were the results of the analysis conducted for the client?

We determined the number of employees who will serve the locations, taking into account the client’s requirements regarding the length of the working day and the time required to complete each separate task.

We identified the best start and end locations for the employees, and thus where it would be best to recruit people to perform each task.

We delineated service regions and assigned employees to each region.

We created daily route plans with a specified number of visits and travel time, taking into account the need to evenly distribute tasks among employees.

We presented a visualization of the sales representatives’ routes on a map.

We calculated the minimum number of kilometers necessary to complete a task.

We indicated the least profitable tasks and routes so that the client could make an informed decision about possible schedule changes.

Result

By using automated route planning tools, the client, in a short period of time, obtained:

a detailed analysis of available routes for sales representatives,
a calculation of how many sales representatives should be employed.

The customer didn’t need to carry out any lengthy calculations or analyses and engage logistics specialists for this process. The company will now be able to estimate the costs of conducting the entire retail venue audit process more easily.

Further developments

One of the factors influencing the calculation of optimal travel routes was the location of the sales representatives performing the tasks. The customer wasn’t able to find employees in all of the recommended locations. Therefore, we recalculated the routes by entering the locations where persons were actually employed – with the aim of making the logistics process as realistic as possible.