Case Study
Introducing Load Consolidation Functionality in AIMMS SC Navigator
In the real world, trucks don’t always carry the same amount of product on every trip. Volumes fluctuate, and planners often know more about the range of load sizes or the number of trips than a single fixed average.
Until now, SC Navigator, our supply chain planning and design application, required users to input an average vehicle load size as data. For example, if a truck typically carries an average load size of 20,000 tons, and you need to move 100,000 tons, the model would calculate that you need five trips.
That works, but it doesn’t always reflect reality. What if your loads range between 10,000 and 30,000 tons, and you know there will be at least four trips in that period? Previously, this level of flexibility wasn’t possible.
This is now possible with our new load and trip constraint functionality.
So, How It Works
The new functionality introduces four powerful attributes that make your transportation planning more flexible and realistic. Let me show you in our example:
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Minimum Load Size | 10,000 |
| Maximum Load Size | 30,000 |
| Minimum number of Trips | 4 |
| Maximum number of Trips | (blank) |
With this setup, SC Navigator might find an optimal solution with four trips averaging around 25,000 tons each, perfectly aligned with your operational reality.
For Mixed Product Loads
Often, your shipments involve multiple products that share the same truck. Using the same example, let’s say instead of 100,000 for one product, this is split over two products. It does not really make sense to specify this on a product level because in reality, these products will most likely be in the same truck.
For these cases, you can now apply these constraints using curly brackets { } around product groups, ensuring the logic applies to the combined load and not to each product separately.
You can also group by ‘from’ or ‘to’ locations, which is useful when modeling outsourced transport, where you pay a price per truck regardless of where it goes.
How Our Customers Use This Functionality in Practice
1. Optimizing Consolidation Center Decisions
A multinational materials manufacturer operates four manufacturing sites across Europe, each producing different products and serving customers nationwide. Some large customers receive full trucks from each site, while smaller customers receive partial shipments from several.
They are studying whether to build a consolidation center to combine shipments. This new functionality helps them instantly answer:
- Which flows should go through the consolidation center versus direct delivery?
- What will typical shipment sizes look like?
- How much can they save overall?
Before, they had to run multiple scenarios and calculate shipment sizes manually. Now, SC Navigator can determine the optimal consolidation automatically in a single solve.
2. Quantifying Multi-Product Consolidation
A leading equipment manufacturer manages multiple warehouses that each stock different product types. They wanted to know if we could combine product types at the same warehouse, and how much we could save by shipping them together.
The new functionality allows them to trade off consolidation benefits against proximity benefits, all in one model run, replacing manual comparisons with automated, data-driven insight.
3. Evaluating Warehouse Closures & Load Consolidation Impact
A global nutrition company is assessing whether to close one of their three warehouses. Reducing the number of warehouses means the remaining ones handle more volume, which should naturally lead to more consolidation in shipments.
By using this functionality, SC Navigator dynamically adjusts:
- If volume increases, consolidation increases (up to the max load size).
- If volume decreases, consolidation reduces (but not below the minimum load size).
That means the model automatically calculates the right shipment and cost levels for each scenario, with no manual fine-tuning required.
Why This Matters
This enhancement makes SC Navigator more realistic and powerful when it comes to modeling load consolidation. You can now model your transportation flows with the flexibility you already have in practice — capturing real-world variations in truck loads, trip counts, and consolidation levels across products, sites, and customers.
Want to see how this functionality works in SC Navigator?
