Smooth changeover to electric trucks with PTV Route Optimizer

The switch to electric trucks has had an impact on the company's transport planning. The dispatchers now have to consider not only the efficiency of the routes but also the range of the electric vehicles and the optimum utilization of their batteries. 

They are supported in this by PTV Route Optimiser. The software allows them to easily create vehicle profiles for diesel and electric trucks with different ranges. "First, we assign the small packages to the diesel vehicles, as the number of stops and kilometers is too large for electric vehicles," says Robin Smaling, Manager of Operations & Sales at TSN Groen. Large parcels are then allocated to the e-vehicles. What remains is distributed to the diesel vehicles. "In these three steps, we create an optimal route plan that is as green as possible."
 

Thanks to PTV Route Optimizer, customers receive a text message two hours before delivery and a call half an hour before arrival. “Thanks to the quality of the data and the tight planning, more than 95% of all shipments arrive within the agreed time frame,” says Smaling. “The reliability is so high that we can even switch to a time window of just one hour this year.” The availability of data has another advantage: route planning is now largely automatic. “In the past, the planner drew the lines between the stops and only calculated the routes with the PTV Route Optimizer,” says Smaling. “Now it's the other way around: the software makes a planning proposal, which is checked by the planner and adjusted if necessary.”

TSN Groen has grown in recent years and now has 1,500 to 2,000 shipments per day, which is too much for manual planning. The use of PTV Route Optimizer helps to avoid human error. “Automation saves the planners time, which they can now use to monitor the routes,” explains Smaling.