About Cooperative Routing

Cooperative routing (CR) is a separately-licensable Oracle Transportation Management component that analyzes historical shipment data in order to identify recurring shipment patterns that present opportunities for fleet resources to drive recurring routes that will allow savings over common carrier cost.

Cooperative routing is a strategic tool to help companies that use private fleets, dedicated fleets, and common carriers, determine the right mix of private/dedicated/common carrier fleet to efficiently handle their shipping needs. The goal of cooperative routing is to identify recurring shipments that can be serviced by the same resource; for example, shipments that form a loop that can all be driven by the same fleet truck, starting and ending at the same home depot.

The inputs to the cooperative routing tool are historical shipments (3 to 6 months worth of shipment information), and/or forecasted volume on the lanes for which the company has shipment needs. Cooperative routing receives these shipments and performs three levels of aggregation - by geography, by time bucket, and by commodity. You are provided with several controls to define the geographies, time buckets, and commodity. At the end of the aggregation process, the system will know the minimum, maximum, and the average number of shipments in an aggregated lane by day of week or a specific shift in a day of the week (your choice). You are provided the ability to modify these statistics based on your knowledge of the lanes and future predictions.

The output of the aggregation process is then fed into the cooperative routing solver, which distributes these aggregated volumes to private fleet, dedicated carrier and common carriers. The system also generates repetitive cooperative route patterns, which is useful in determining the fleet size for dedicated private fleet.

Route execution incorporates the strategic component of cooperative routing with the execution piece. You can create a route template from a CR route using the action Convert to Route Template or from the user interface or XML integration. From route templates, route instances can be quickly generated.

There are various reports available specific to cooperative routing and route execution. Some are just at a summary level while others allow you to drill down to details. All the cooperative reports use a time period of weekly.