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What is capacity planning? How is it organized in normal times?
In the context of logistics, capacity planning consists in planning goods orders in advance, based on available stocks and the means of transport available to date.
This is an important task because it allows an organization to plan its freight transport in advance, to better predict its costs by anticipating them, and to ensure that goods arrive on time and on time.
However, it is also an arduous task, often long and painful for teams. Indeed, the implementation of this planning is a complex process, involving many elements and several stakeholders. Moreover, the more planning is organized in advance, the more difficult it becomes.
In fact, for an industrial shipper, forecasting rail transport for a whole year becomes almost impossible. However, being able to do it only once a year would avoid teams having to repeat this complex process and be able to focus on other tasks with higher added value.
In reality, capacity planning often takes place over a few weeks, or even a few months. However, for specific industries such as building materials or the steel industry, a capacity planning extending over a year is essential to their activity.
This is why supporting manufacturers by facilitating and automating this task is now one of the key functionalities of TVMS, in order to make capacity planning possible over a whole year.
The TVMS Capacity Planning feature: cost savings, time savings, and better resource allocation
The intelligent RALF assistant integrated into the TVMS takes care of this task. Thanks to artificial intelligence, planning no longer needs to be done manually, and only needs team supervision.
In drawing up the schedule, RALF takes into account all the criteria necessary to optimize it as best as possible:
- The characteristics of the trip:
- Carriers
- Contract validity dates
- Type of authorized cars
- Possible loading date
- Departure and arrival times
- Maximum tonnage
- Product availability (if determined) per day
- Product categories as defined on the loading site
- Compatibility between cars and products
- Availability of loading areas and number of cars present
- Availability of unloading areas
- Lowest cost
The capacity planning functionality makes it possible to go from manual, time-consuming, complex and expensive planning to automated and optimized planning in less than a day, at the lowest cost.
