EPG VRS Innovation and Industry Recognition

According to the Gartner Market Guide report, “The vehicle routing application market remains very dynamic despite being a mature market. The evolution of applications due to new business needs has made vendors expand their capabilities in certain areas or even specialize their products in a specific area like last-mile operations. Vendors keep entering the market with new and more innovative solutions, providing applications that not only automate transport planning tasks and reduce time and cost in transportation operations, but also automate and optimize operations.” It adds, “Growing e-commerce operations have increased the requirement for businesses to adapt to quickly changing customer demands to remain competitive. Many of the vendors have adjusted their applications to support both B2B truckload transportation and B2C last-mile operations, providing customer engagement and other capabilities with operations like the use of external fleets. These solutions are extending their carrier networks (including carriers, courier and local fleets), extending the reach of the shipper’s fleet in certain areas, or helping them provide a better or faster service.”

According to Gartner, “A Market Guide defines a market and explains what clients can expect it to do in the short term. With the focus on early, more chaotic markets, a Market Guide does not rate or position vendors within the market, but rather more commonly outlines attributes of representative vendors that are providing offerings in the market to give further insight into the market itself.”1 In the 2023 Market Guide for VRS, Gartner recommends supply chain leaders should “Compare VRS offerings by evaluating multiple aspects of the vendor and its product, such as geography presence and industry coverage, and product capabilities, such as optimization, automation, fleet management, cost and customer experience.” Gartner also recommends that supply chain technology leaders should “Validate the benefits of extended capabilities of VRS — such as customer engagement, artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), visibility, sustainability and scenario modeling — to identify if these warrant adoption or replacement in your business.”

Unique tour district boundary innovation

EPG’s Greenplan is a mathematically-based, class-leading route planner, manager and optimizer co-developed with DHL and the University of Bonn. A cloud-only solution, it comprises three product lines: Engine, Planning and Execution. The Engine can interact with and enrich any existing customer TMS, thus minimizing or eradicating disruption to systems, while the Planning and Execution capability offerings available include territory planning, geofencing, dynamic and static routing and dispatching, all backed up by unmatched intra-day route change and adjustment opportunities boasting reaction times in seconds.

Uniquely, Greenplan offers the eye-catching ability to consider a broad geographical delivery area and to soften the borders between formerly rigid routing districts, thus enabling those districts to overlap where customer service and routing efficiency will benefit from doing so.

Another Greenplan ‘first’ gives businesses the opportunity to exploit to their advantage the peak and off-peak characteristics of today’s daily traffic flows, offering optimal planning to benefit delivery routes, timings and efficiencies. Time-of-Day Dependent driving times calculate routes according to the specific hours in the day the route is being actioned, with accurate historical data at street-segment level and five-minute intervals constantly collating information to update the overall picture. Flexible tour starting times, where appropriate, offer opportunities to pick up efficiencies and thus slash costs and carbon emissions.

Savings of 30% combined with driver satisfaction

“Greenplan was launched just two years ago, so we are very proud of its lightning impact and the unique VRS opportunities our solution brings to transport operators all over the world, including savings of up to 30% compared to standard solutions,” said Clemens Beckmann, CEO Greenplan.

“We take great satisfaction from the fact that dispatchers very much enjoy working with Greenplan, too,” added his CEO colleague, Florian Merget. “They can now rely on an excellent dynamic route planning engine knowing that they will not have to consider adjusting or correcting routes manually at the last minute because Greenplan will do it for them, in seconds. Everyone wins with Greenplan.” 

As a mathematics-based application, Greenplan is bringing similar thinking to the future product pipeline. In anticipation of expected laws regarding both the accountancy and taxation of carbon emissions later in this decade, Greenplan scientists and engineers are taking inspiration from ‘Happy Nucleolus’ a game-theory concept from the 1980s, to construct an algorithm which will calculate cost division among a shared network. The principle of fair synergy ensures that any coalition of fewer network participants will receive a higher cost allocation for each participant.

The 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Vehicle Routing and Scheduling is now available to download: Download VRS Report (epg.com).

1Gartner Research Methodology, “Market Guide”, 3 October 2023. www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/market-guide

Gartner, Market Guide for Vehicle Routing and Scheduling, Nathan Lease, Carly West, Oscar Sanchez Duran, 25 September 2023.

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