The major player in food distribution logistics in the Antilles

With more than 330,000 tons of goods transported to the Antilles each year, Logtran delivers 140,000 orders annually. It supplies Carrefour, Proxi, 8 à Huit and Promocash stores with dry, fresh and frozen products from its 8 warehouses.

As well as organising deliveries, the transportation plan needs to take account of any return of goods, and thus put in place the reverse logistics for returning products from delivery points to depots.

In this industry where quality of service is key, automating operations planning is essential to make deliveries more reliable and more eco-friendly.

The core of the project consists in setting up a planning solution capable of optimising in synergy the different steps of the decision chain. The problem posed is highly complex and cannot be solved by standard tools. In particular, it is necessary to deal with the coupling of the truck loading problem with the routing optimisation and the order preparation. It is also crucial to be able to synchronise several rotations carried out by the same vehicle.

« After a first experience with a routing optimisation solution of the market, we realised that our real need was not just optimising delivery routes, but to ensure consistency between the different layers of the decision chain: order preparation, use of transport equipments, truck loading, routes synchronisation, and assignment of drivers to different rotations » explains Edouard Imbault-Huart, Logistics and Distribution Director at Logtran.

Most of the existing solutions only offer a hierarchical treatment of these decisions, with a “myopic” vision of the operations: think one pallet at a time, organise the loading of one truck at a time, assign drivers to rotation by rotation… With the risk of having the last resources misused.

A global approach is needed to manage the interdependence of these decisions. It enables routes to be designed with vehicle loading in mind, thereby optimising the grouping of customer orders by pallet. It is on the macroscopic and structuring decisions of the organisation of the distribution chain that the most important margins of improvement can be achieved.

20% reduction in transportation costs thanks to Atoptima’s softwares

As a software editor, specialised in solving complex optimisation problems, Atoptima has been able to take into account very specific constraints of the logistician (see the use case). For instance, the tool considers the separation of order references to facilitate unloading on the sections of large and medium-sized stores.

The result is a minimisation of travel distances, routing duration and a fair distribution of the workload between the drivers.

« With this kind of planning automation, Logtran is now able to offer a better quality of customer service with a better consolidation of volumes that are consolidated and grouped on different types of racks, thus ensuring a high degree of consistency between orders and their delivery support. At this stage, we estimate that this project will allow us to reduce our transportation costs by 15% to 20% and to reduce our ecological footprint, which is a source of pollution and traffic jams » adds Edouard Imbault-Huart, Logistics and Distribution Director at Logtran.

From a functional point of view, Logtran was already equipped with business process management softwares, namely a Transportation Management System (TMS) and a Warehouse Management System (WMS). In order to automate its decision-making, the company chose to enhance these systems by integrating Atoptima’s optimisation softwares, accessible in Software-As-A-Service micro-service mode.

« Management Systems such as TMS and WMS are a big step forward in the digital transformation of organisations, but they don’t provide the engine to automate decision-making. This is where Atoptima’s optimisation modules perform in a complementary way by enhancing a business application with mathematical optimisation functionalities » explains François Vanderbeck, Scientific Director at Atoptima.

About Atoptima :

Atoptima is a DeepTech software editor offering powerful optimization modules for operations planning such as vehicle routing, loading and positioning, depot location, production scheduling, inventory management, load smoothing, scheduling… Spin-off of an Inria / CNRS team, Atoptima industrializes the results of 25 years of research in mathematical optimization. Based on its software library, Atoptima produces applications accessible in SaaS mode that address the most complex variants of optimization problems.

About Logtran :

Logtran is the forerunner in the cold chain and distribution of dry, fresh and frozen products in the Antilles and French Guiana. It acts on the entire supply chain: from worldwide purchasing to all-temperature logistics and wholesale and retail sales in Guadeloupe, Saint-Martin, Martinique and Guyana. Logtran handles the distribution of more than 100 franchise stores under the Carrefour banners and products from the FNAC, Picard and Maisons du Monde catalogs.