This Case study is about a company that deals with clients of the automotive industry that are spread around major parts of United States of America. The service company deals with the geographical location services of its customers. A route sheet is used by the branch manager to determine the location of its customers and then the representatives drive the trucks to that location. The company makes use of Transportation Management System (TMS) in the route sheets for determining the most efficient route between the customers to save time and money involved in the transportation.
Summary
This case study made use of a five step process called Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control to enhance the overall efficiency of the …show more content…
The finalized route sheet was sent to the service representative for the execution. Any suggestions for improvement by the service representatives would be time consuming since they are at the final stage of the process. All details of the branch and customer are fed into the TMS and an optimum route sheet is generated. The TMS converts each address into a geocode. If the TMS can find out the entire address, then the geocode score is high or else the score is low. This code was standardized and used to accurately determine the travel time between two locations. An input-process-output analysis was performed to determine the best possible inputs for processing to get the most accurate estimate of distances between the locations. Branch personnel training, geocoding and standardize addresses were found to be the most relevant inputs in order to get accurate …show more content…
Improving the route quality is a good way to improve efficiency, but there are more different methods for improvement. For example, the project could have suggested that their TMS finds out any other method to reduce fuel cost to achieve more savings for the company. We are assuming that the shortest distance with the fastest route is the ultimate goal for distribution. In this case, there is no shame if the project team asks for more support for this route optimization. In supply chain management, there are many options to improve the company 's distribution. There is one software called SCP&O (Supply Chain Planning & Optimization) which can improve your supply chain. Quintiq, is a leading company using SCP&O software, that holds many world records in supply chain competition. The project team should consider using one of these companies along with their third-party TMS company to improve their route planning performance.
The last stage of the six-sigma project controls phase that shows the department performance on a specific operation, and also the consistency and sustainability of the project. The major results that the project team can show are reduced expenses and time-consuming change to the finalized route by 20 percent, which is a significant number for improvement. But what exactly is the 20 percent representing? The outcome would have been