Load Planning: Strategy for Faster & Cheaper Deliveries

When movers show up at your home to load your furniture and belongings, they slide them into the truck like puzzle pieces. It’s load planning at its best. However, load planning has proven to be a challenging task when it comes to loading delivery trucks. If your company masters it though, it can be an invaluable tool to help get your customers their products faster and at a lower cost.

What is Load Planning?

Also known as load optimization, load planning is everything encompassed in organizing items to most efficiently fit in a specific space and minimizing the number of vehicles needed to deliver each package or order. For instance, the height and weight of an item must be considered to ensure stability and to meet the capacity of the truck.

You have to take into account the difference between actual weight and dimensional weight. Let’s layout an example:

You have a truck that can carry 2,000 pounds and offers 300 square feet of space. The allowable weight and square footage both need to be considered.A box with five pounds of gold is going to be tiny because gold is a dense item, so a load of all gold to stay under the weight limitations wouldn’t fill the truck. However, five pounds of popcorn is going to require several large boxes, so you wouldn’t use the full-weight capacity.

And this doesn’t even begin to think about load optimization — placing the packages in a way that makes them most easily accessible based on the route order.

Both of these examples represent significant factors in effective load planning.

The Importance of Load Planning

If you’ve been sending out packages without giving it a second thought, you might wonder if load planning is worth the extra effort. You’ll find that load planning can be an integral part of your shipping routine that helps your company succeed and grow. Some of the reasons this type of planning is important for your business include:

Efficiency

Load planning ensures efficiency. One of the main focuses for shipping companies is to develop faster in and out times. For example, when loading a truck, you want to put the last delivery in first and the first delivery in last, so when the deliveries occur, the loaders don’t have to take items out and put them back in to reach a specific delivery.

This creates efficiency. This efficiency extends beyond loading and unloading the truck. The efficiency extends to the number of packages that can go out in a single vehicle. This lowers the number of trucks that are required to get your packages to their final destination. This efficiency allows you to meet your shipping expectations because all your packages can ship out together. Cost efficiency is also achieved when your packages ship together.

Cost Reduction

When you have a load planning strategy in place that increases efficiencies in the process, you can realize many tangible cost reductions. If your load isn’t packed correctly and doesn’t include as many packages as possible, you’ll have to make multiple trips, doubling the costs with every additional one. By consolidating the number of shipments, you save money on fuel and labor.

You can also reduce the costs of any truck rentals your company needs or the purchase of additional vehicles to move the same amount of product. There are also intangible ways that load planning can save you money. For instance, when loads are planned correctly, the customer receives them more quickly and won’t request refunds or considerations due to longer shipping times.

Timely Delivery

Depending on the type of product, a large segment expects delivery within 24 hours of placing an order. Customers who are willing to wait longer still expect their orders to arrive within two or three business days. Last-mile delivery, the point at which the package arrives at the vehicle that is going to do the final delivery, can play a large role in timely deliveries.

When you can send out more packages in a single load, packages that would have had to wait for the next shipment arrive more quickly. Timely deliveries lead to higher customer satisfaction and more future orders. With the route optimized, the driver isn’t losing time by driving back and forth over ground that they’ve already covered, which helps with timely deliveries.

Strategies for Effective Load Planning

Load planning isn’t one size fits all. There are varied strategies that you can employ for effective load planning. In 2023, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 393,980 people around the company work in load planning and management. In most cases, the most effective strategy depends on the amount of shipping you generate, your goals from planning, and the expectations of your customers. You may also find that blending or mixing and matching strategies reap the most benefits for your company. Here are a few strategies to consider:

Data Collection and Analysis

To begin load planning, you need to collect and analyze all pertinent data. You need to collect data, such as the number of packages you send out each day, week, and month, along with the size and weight of all of them, individually and combined. If you’re transporting your shipments at any point, you need to collect data on the number and size of the vehicles. You’ll want data on the amount of fuel used and any maintenance costs.

How many people do you have loading and unloading packages? You need to know how many employees are involved in loading and the amount of time each person spends on this job. With all this information at your fingertips, you’ll be able to more easily see where you can save time and money in any number of areas.

Load Consolidation

Load consolidation is an excellent load planning strategy if you’re delivering all your products to the end customer. You don’t want to let a truck or van leave when it’s half empty or underweight unless there’s a route issue that would make it less efficient. You need to look at all the products you ship in a day or week and find places where loads can be consolidated.

This type of strategy might include shipping products earlier. For example, if you deliver products to two different businesses next door to each other on different days, you need to consolidate these two shipments into a single one. A load consolidation strategy ensures that your vehicles go out as full as they possibly can every time they leave your warehouse.

Route Optimization

Whether you make the first delivery at the customer the furthest out or the client closest to your warehouse, you need to ensure that all the deliveries that follow the first one are completed in order. You might have deliveries that cause you to adjust the route, but load planning helps you determine at what point during the route it makes the most sense to deviate from the route, make the delivery, and return to the regular journey.

Route optimization also takes into account how much time it takes to run the route and complete it. Some deliveries might need to be moved to another vehicle and route for optimization. You need to look at the efficiency of running the route and pivot whenever necessary.

Capacity Utilization

Is everything and everyone involved in loading, driving, and planning a shipment being utilized effectively? Capacity utilization is about how well your company’s resources are being used to generate effective shipments and deliveries. These resources can include equipment, labor, facilities, and other items involved in the process.

For example, if your warehouse has a dock, but your employees are walking packages down the stairs and loading them in the back of the truck, you haven’t reached capacity utilization. The employees should be walking them into the back of the truck from the dock. A forklift might make it easier to load multiple packages at once, which would take three employees a longer time.

Scheduling and Timing

For the customer, the package arrives on their doorstep or desk on time as if by magic. However, if you’re in charge of load planning, scheduling and timing is an essential component. You want the vehicles to leave your location at a certain time to make these deliveries, which means you need to ensure that you have enough labor that arrives earlier to load the trucks and vans.

It’s a precise timing issue to have all the packages ready to be loaded and the employees to load them so the truck leaves on time. You also need to consider the routes as part of scheduling and timing because sending a truck out too early or too late can leave the driver faced with traffic jams that throw off their schedule.

Benefits of Effective Load Planning

Before you take the time or expend the energy to begin a load planning strategy, you want to know what the benefits are for your company. There are a host of benefits your business can enjoy when you develop a winning load planning strategy. These benefits are:

Cost Savings

Saving money is always one of the goals of any business plan. Load planning is one way to do this. When you have the right equipment, labor, vehicles, and routes in place, you don’t run extra expenses that aren’t necessary. You don’t have employees waiting around for the truck to show up or drivers who drive 20 miles in one direction to make a delivery only to double back 10 miles to make another.

Load planning also saves you money by ensuring that each load leaves with as much product as possible and that the product is placed on the truck in a way that keeps it from being damaged during transit. Effective load planning helps you lower fuel and maintenance costs as well as the expense of purchasing additional vehicles.

Faster Deliveries

Customers order a product and want it to arrive within the hour. While that almost always isn’t a possibility, with load planning, your company is able to make faster deliveries. From finding the right last-mile service to ensuring products that aren’t part of the delivery need to come out first, you’re able to arrive and complete the delivery more quickly.

Load planning can also reduce the time spent loading a delivery truck or van, which allows it to leave on time. Correct timing and scheduling minimize the instances of traffic and time wasted at one delivery where the receiver isn’t ready to accept the products.

Sustainability

Less time on the road and driving fewer miles to get the product where it needs to go helps to lower your company’s carbon footprint. When you invest in the right equipment, you’ll find that it works more effectively, and you won’t need to replace it any sooner than necessary, providing additional sustainability.

Your carbon emissions are lower when your delivery trucks drive fewer miles, and the loads are optimal. Your route planning should further lower the number of miles driven, which lowers your fuel bill and makes your business model more sustainable.

Select Elite EXTRA to Meet Your Last-Mile Delivery Needs

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Source

https://capitaloneshopping.com /research/package-delivery-statistics

https://www.omnicalculator.com /other/dimensional-weight

https://www.statista.com /statistics/1279369/delivery-time-expectation-online-shoppers-worldwide

https://www.bls.gov /oes/current/oes435061.htm