Dynamic Levelling for Inbound Logistic

STATUS: Supplier organizes daily material call-offs

One of the world’s largest suppliers to the automotive industry, based in Canada, manages the inbound logistics of its 347 manufacturing facilities in 28 countries. Material is shipped from multiple suppliers into production plants based on material call offs generated by MRP systems such as SAP.


Challenge: Lack of optimization of transport planning

Today material is shipped based on the planned MRP demand schedule no matter if trucks are fully utilized or just partly loaded.

The generation of demand call offs in existing MPR system is not considering transport optimization. However, optimization of truck utilization offers enormous cost savings potentials to logistics costs. In addition, a reduced number of transports also significantly reduces the CO2 footprint.

Solution: Dynamic Levelling

Implementation of flexis Dynamic Levelling, which is part of the flexis Transport Planning & Scheduling (TPS) software solution. This solution optimizes the utilization of trucks by adapting call off dates and volumes planned by the MRP system within permitted boundaries. How does this work in detail?

  1. flexis dynamic levelling receives part demads scheduled by the MRP (SAP) System for next n weeks and calculates the number of handling units (e.g., pallets) to be transported based on packaging information
  2. The flexis solver engine optimizes the truck utilization by levelling handling units, (pulling them ahead or postponing them to fill up trucks as close as possible to their maximum transport capacities
  3. The solver uses internally generated constraints that define the possible time range of levelling for each material number and guarantee an even distribution of the material numbers adapted.
  4. The truck optimized call offs are transferred back to the MRP (SAP) System, where the changes must be updated and fixed.



The flexis solution provides the ability to monitor for each day of the planning horizon:

  • Demand per route and material level over the horizon
  • Calculated volumes, weights and/or loadmeters and no. of handling units
  • Calculated truck utilization based on original MRP input demand versus truck utilization optimized by the system

As a result, the flexis solution provides the planner with:

  • Optimized transport orders for each truck of the planning horizon
  • Resulting cost savings and other KPI


Conclusion: Significant savings in inbound logistics

The flexis software enables the customer to leverage logistics cost savings by decreasing the number of transports required due to optimized truck utilization, while still guaranteeing the accurate delivery of material on time.