Overview

RoutingSolutions.ie is the Transport, Distribution and Logistics unit of ESRI Ireland. Its core business is based on analysing the impact of geography on business processes and workflows, within a number of industry sectors in Ireland. Over the last two years we have completed a comprehensive market research study on Ireland’s Logistics and Distribution industry, focusing on the issues of route planning, route optimization, scheduling and business analysis.

On the basis of our experience in Transport Logistics the secotr is currently experiencing a range of challenges that are mainly due to increasing operational costs and the consequent need to improve efficiency to protect margins. In addition due to the characteristics of the Irish road network transport logistics operators are finding it increasingly difficult to calculate accurate driving times. Therefore adhering to customer time windows while at the same time respecting vehicle access restrictions can represent a significant challenge. The recent changes in the composition of the workforce due to the influx of foreign national have also created the additional challenge of the lack of territory knowledge by drivers: ending up in the wrong place can have serious implications on the delivery schedule for that day on both cost and customer satisfaction.

Driver absenteeism or turnover can have a massive impact on your organisation’s ability to deliver: it takes time to train a replacement driver and generally requires routes to be driven by two people for some time.

Our evidence and the experiences of our customers have demonstrated that these challenges can be successfully managed by adopting a vehicle routing and scheduling solution.