Location Capacities and Bulk Planning

Location capacity allows you to define different types of constraints at any location. These constraints limit the amount of work you can do for a specific activity during a time frame or a time bucket. For example, a store receiving truck loads of goods may have limited space in their yard to receive more than a few loads at the same time. Even in situations where there is enough yard space, some locations might have a shortage of skilled resources to unload the freight. OTM’s optimization engines recognize these constraints and shifts the start time of the shipments in order to honor these constraints.

You can define several time buckets with different durations (or bucket widths), and provide target capacities and maximum capacities. The capacities can be defined on shipment count, total weight of freight handled at the stop or total volume of freight handled at the stop. You can also specify how the capacity is consumed at the stop through the capacity allocation rule.

A bulk plan running location capacity optimization will only take into account that bulk plan even if another bulk plan is also running location capacity optimization at the same time.

Examples

For example, you can define a capacity of 1 shipment per 24 hours by entering the following: an activity ID of 'Pickup', a calendar ID of 24 hours, a capacity type of 'Shipment', a time bucket duration of 1, and maximum and target quantities of 1.

As another example, you can create a location capacity calendar that defines a target capacity of 5000 lbs of freight per hour with a maximum of 5500 lbs of freight. The target represents a desired level for balancing the workload at the location. In addition to these hourly targets, there are certain overrides defined for certain hours of the day where the maximum capacities are higher. You would define this by entering the following: an activity ID of Receive, a capacity type of 'Weight', a maximum weight of 5500 lbs, and a target weight of 5000 lbs.

It is important to remember that location capacities will disturb the times on the shipment stops and hence could potentially override the decisions made by the carrier capacity logic, at times even violating certain carrier capacities. When this happens, the violated shipments will be unassigned during the final commit of the shipments to the database. Therefore, it is strongly suggested that carrier capacity and location capacity logic not be used together in the same bulk plan run.