Altura Blog

Where does Load Planning fit in your Enterprise?

Today we'll take a look at how Load Planning software can work alongside your existing systems. Certainly it is a process that can be applied to a number of stages in order fulfillment. Therefore a good, enterprise-strength Load Planning application must have a rich set of features to support such a diverse selection of requirements. No two operations are ever quite the same, of course, but logistics operations can be broadly split into a number of categories:

1. Order Handling

• Order Taking: pricing, cost estimations, packing lists, improved order fit.
• Order Generation: improve Less-Than-Load quantities, perform fast “what-if” exercises, fill out containers.

2. Order Fulfillment

• Picking: follow warehouse routes, plan routes
• Palletization: build pallets
• Cartonization: picking, packing, e-tailing operations
• Truck / Trailer / Railcar loading

3. Distribution Planning

4. Planning cargo space reservation and usage

5. Warehouse Management (WMS) / Transport Management (TMS)

The Cube-IQ Load Planning engine can already be found built right into leading WMS and TMS systems from such tier 1 providers as HighJump, Swisslog and Visalign.

So, you will find Load Planning requirements in 101 places in the enterprise: on the screen of the person taking an order over the phone, telling the client that more may be ordered for the same transportation cost. The same business then requires the system to actually plan the physical load once the order is completed.

You will also find systems working behind the scenes to help give real-time shipping costs to e-tailers’ clients via their web sites.

Warehouses optimize loads for re-consolidation, and a number of railways' web sites assist the client in reserving the right equipment for a shipment via load planning algorithms.

Freight forwarders optimize loads to arrive at a lower quotation.

And of course, in each case, creation of a successful, efficient, safe load can be a daunting task. Mathematics tells us that there are literally billions of ways to load even just a few products into a container. Factor in possible orientations, stacking rules, weight limits, balance, bracing, safety…

Fortunately, experience and human intelligence guides us in the right direction, but the sheer volume of data which needs to be handled means that this is an ideal job for an intelligent, automated software solution.

All this, and more, is smooth, fast and automated with Cube-IQ.

But Joe on the loading dock…

… does a great job, right?

Sorry Joe… but any good load planning system would be expected to out-perform a manual load by several percentage points. Experience certainly does count for a lot when planning a load, and that’s why we have built years of experience into the Cube-IQ system.

One of the real advantages of load planning software is that you can run many variants of the same load through the system from the comfort of your office chair. You can play around with the numbers, work the system, even move the products around with your mouse until you get everything locked down just right.

Then you click the button and your load report is emailed to head office, your manifest is faxed to your shippers… and your picking list and load plans are wirelessly transmitted to good ol’ Joe’s hand-held down there on the loading dock.