Barge Planning

Capgemini offers full service to the shipping companies as the world’s largest project & consulting practice in this sector! Part of this service is our service offering on Advanced Planning & Scheduling for shipping companies. This offering gives you the opportunity to optimize your barge planning puzzle while honouring customers SLA’s.

The offered planning solution for the shipping businesses is focused on but not restricted to:

Tramp planning
Liner planning
Barge planning
Crew planning
Container repositioning

The Challenge

The consolidation of shipping companies, increasing competition of rail and road transport companies, economical downfall (less cargo and decreased shipping prices), and available capacity are major challenges. This has resulted in the shift from a buyers market to a sellers market, with customers expecting more for less.

With BARGE PLANNING you need to optimise the TCE by honouring the SLA’s agreed in the CoA and filling the “gaps” with spot orders. When doing so you need to deal with the constraints that relay to the lay-can, products, rivers and/or canals, ships and terminals. Even though barging is part of the logistics supply chain planning the communication with sea- and inland terminals have always proven to be challenging to say the least.

The planning puzzle was never easy but is even less easy today. So you can’t effort to rely on business critical excel sheets any more.

The Solution

APS (Advance Planning & Scheduling) offers the solution that helps you dealing with these challenges. The decision support of APS assists the planner in creating the best achievable transport plan, aiding him to optimise the TCE without damaging customer service. The solution offers the usage of XML interfaces to i.e. Dakosy or Portinfolink which gives you access to the most reliable and latest terminal information needed to optimise the operational and event planning.

With the usage of simulations the planner can play around with the shipments and immediately see the effect on the KPI’s. At the same time management can make tactical and strategic use of the APS solution for instance to analyse optimum fleet capacity as well as contract optimisation.

The Benefits

The benefits are evident, significant improvement in fleet utilisation which reduces the operational cost. The optimised transport plan will result in a better fitting schedule offering improved service to your customers. Improving the communication will help you benefit from having crucial planning information on time at the right place and makes the logistic supply chain planning more transparent for those involved. As an add-on there is the positive environmental impact thanks to the improved transport plan you have less overall mileage and by reducing speed where possible you save fuel.

Overall the quick business benefits are:

Improved TCE
Less idle time
Less time ballast runs
Reducing fuel consumption (reduce the carbon foot print)
Decreased operational costs

Planning for Profit
Better planning is directly related to better performance. In order to manage the complexity and keep overview over all the details in the planning, you need to focus on the key performance indicators (KPI’s). We help you identify the KPI’s and we make sure that the KPI’s are measurable. Thus, we enable you to steer on the quality and profitability of the plans. In short: planning for profit.

An APS solution implemented by Capgemini’s GSC APS, has the following additional benefits:

Solve your planning puzzles in all their complexity
Makes your planning process transparent
Consistency between planning and realization
Fits in any IT landscape

Why Us

Realizing complex multi-resource planning solutions is one of the core capabilities of Capgemini’s Global Solution Center APS. The solution center has successfully carried out over 40 Quintiq implementations at a wide range of industries. Capgemini’s Rightshore® delivery model, involving local entities and development centers in India and Holland, ensure high quality and sufficient implementation capacity in the emerging APS market.

Capgemini has a thriving Transport & Distribution sector, and has long standing relationships in the shipping sector. Capgemini’s experience in this sector is captured in the Competence Centre Ports & Shipping in The Netherlands (50 consultants) and the Maritime Knowledge Centre Norway. Our expertise is at your disposal.

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