logistics for fast-moving consumer goods: a -
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Philip Kilby
Principal Researcher
NICTA and ANU
philip.kilby@nicta.com.au
Logistics for Fast-Moving Consumer
Goods: A Focus on Profits
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NICTA
• National Information and Communications Technology
Australia (NICTA)
• Research in ICT since 2004
• Major Labs in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra
• 700 researchers, including 300 PhD students
• Currently government funded
• Areas:
– Broadband and the Digital Economy
– Health
– Infrastructures, Transport and Logistics
– Safety and Security
Use-inspired Research
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Motivation
Problem area:
• Delivery of goods and services to customers
• This talk will concentrate on
– Repeated routes: same route every week
– Delivery of goods from depots to customers
– e.g.: Delivery of bread from distribution centres to
customers
• Line-haul component (bakery to distribution centre)
considered separately.
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Motivation
Traditional Vehicle Routing:
• Given
– a set of customers, and
– a fleet of vehicles
• Find the routes which cover all customers at minimum cost
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Motivation
Profit-based vehicle routing (a.k.a. Profitable Tour Problem)
• Given
– customers with known revenues,
– vehicles with known fixed and variable operating costs
• Choose
– which customers to visit
– which vehicles and routes to use
•to maximize profit (= revenue – cost)
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Motivation
Alternative channels
• Changed frequency (5 days Mon, Wed, Fri)
• Self-serve
• Buying groups
• New wholesale venues
Alternative strategies
• Impose a delivery charge
• Find more customers near underperforming customers
• Avoid the problem in the first place –
check cost of adding before signing customer
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Marginal cost
(cost with customer) minus (cost without customer)
works for consecutive customers
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Removing vehicles
Revenue $250,000 p/a
Fixed cost $100,000
Variable cost $100,000
Profit $ 50,000
Revenue $190,000 p/a
Fixed cost $ 50,000
Variable cost $ 70,000
Profit $ 70,000
1
2 1’
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Removing vehicles
Revenue $250,000 p/a
Fixed cost $100,000
Variable cost $100,000
Profit $ 50,000
Revenue $250,000 p/a
Fixed cost $ 80,000
Variable cost $ 80,000
Profit $ 90,000
1
2
1’
Fleet size and mix is an
important part of identifying
profitable customers
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Modified OrOpt
• OrOpt
– Given a starting tour, sets Sk of k consecutive customers
are moved from one position to another position (in
forward and reverse order) in the tour
• Modified OrOpt
– Just like OrOpt, but with one extra position in the tour,
which is the unassigned position
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Large Neighborhood Search
For various fleet configurations:
• Solution = OrOptSweep(<input>, k)
• For i = 1 to n
Solution’ = Destroy(Solution)
Solution’’ = Repair(Solution’)
Solution’’’ = OrOptSweep(Solution’’, k)
if (Solution’’’ better than Solution)
Solution = Solution’’’
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• Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company
• 1,000,000 products
• 20,000 customers across Australia
• 100 distribution centres
• 600 vehicles
• 80% of transportation costs are “last mile logistics”
Case study
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Case study
Classification
%Customers %Volume
Large Customers 13% 64%
Medium Customers 12% 17%
Small Customers 75% 19%
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Case study
In some ways, a classic VRP
• Capacity constraints
• (Soft) time window constraints
• Compatibility constraints
(some customers can’t use some vehicles)
• Maximum duration constraint
Plus, a googly
• Same-driver constraint:
– Even though different routes are driven each day, the same
driver must visit a customer each day they are visited
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Method
• Input
– Almost 20,000 customers
– More than 600 trucks
– Demand data for 91 days (= 13 weeks)
• Output
– Current customer base and current routes (Benchmark)
– Current customers base and optimized routes (VRP run)
– Optimised customer base and optimized routes (PTP run)
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Results
• 15% of the customers (almost 3,000) were determined to be
unprofitable
• Significant cost savings identified by serving only 85% of the
customers
Classification %Contribution
Reduction
Large Customers 0%
Medium Customers 12%
Small Customers 88%
(13%→15%)
(12%→12%)
(75%→73%)
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Implementation
Actual implementation achieved bulk of identified savings
• Change of channel for more than 1,000 customers
• Fleet reduced by 15%
• Distance reduced by 1,000,000 km (1 Gm?)
• Total transport costs reduced by 10%
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Conclusions
Focus on total profitability
• More than just minimising costs
• Choosing customers, fleet and routes
• It works
Current research: Cost allocation methods
• Allocate total cost to all customers
• Correct answer: “Shapely values”
– exact, but very hard to calculate
• Need supportable approximations
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Related work
• Shapley value [Shapley, 1953]
– Represents the average marginal cost of a player in a co-
operative game
• Profitable Tour Problem (PTP) [Dell’Amico et al., 1995]
– Max viV piyi – (vi, vj)A cijxij
– Subject to:
– vjV\{vj} xji = yi (vi V)
– vjV\{vj} xij = yi (vi V)
– Subtour elimination
– y1 = 1
– xij {0, 1} ((vi, vj) A)
– yi {0, 1} (vi V)
− Fixed costs
− Vehicle capacities
− Service times
− Time windows
− Maximum durations
− Multiple routes
− Routes specifications
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Future work
• Compare with other cost allocation and PTP methods
• Look into methods that are more “robust” to some change in
routing
• Explain why a customer is removed
– Helps to identify how to make a customer profitable again
Menkes van den Briel
Researcher
NICTA and UNSW
menkes@nicta.com.au
Phil Kilby
Principal Researcher
NICTA and ANU
phil.kilby@nicta.com.au
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