HERE Webinar: Increase Efficiency in Your Routing and Delivery Operations

Highlights and Soundbites:

Conceptualizing the “ideal” routing solution

David Breeding: “When we think about optimal or ideal solutions right, it really is a business answer. The people that are responsible for kind of getting the job done are evaluating often times in this planning capacity what that means. As we break [it] down here there’s those two dimensions right, all those navigational factors which are really important; having that data on hand, having traffic conditions, understanding the roadways, you know, can you be on there? Can you actually bring your truck or bring your vehicle along those pathways? You need all that data available to try and answer the question. You also need to understand those constraints as it relates to how you’re going to actually get the job done. What types of trucks? What types of drivers do you have available? Their schedules? There’s just a lot of different dimensions that need to be considered for you to arrive at that ideal solution, and so, when we think about this, this is where we start. We want to understand when we’re working with customers; what they’re working with, what they currently have, and then evaluate where there’s opportunities to get closer. There is no ideal solution, it’s ‘an approaching towards the best’ solution that’s possible given what we have available.”

HERE Tour Planning API

Charlie Maynard: “One of our core focus areas at HERE Technologies is the transportation Logistics space, and one of the key products in this area is our Tour Planning API. This tool creates optimized routes for many different types of transportation networks, from middle mile deliveries between DCs (distribution centers), warehouses and stores, to complex Last Mile networks in dense urban B2C environments. The API can handle a wide range of networks in complexity and size; in terms of both the number of vehicles in the fleet, and also in the number of deliveries that each one of those vehicles has to make.”

Dave Holmes: “How does a company get started with this technology? We are a partner of HERE. We’ve been with HERE for a couple of years. We have a good bit of experience in the world of logistics, and its partners like us who are ready to help you get going. We can sit down and understand your use case, we can have a conversation around which APIs to take advantage of, and you might string those together to solve your particular routing and logistic challenges. Of course, we can assist with your account setup and billing, and get you access to the here API licenses. We also offer a couple of options to assist if you need some additional help in building out an application to meet your exact needs with HERE technologies. One is a consulting service, and also application development services.”

Dave: “We [AppGeo] can help you with consulting on best practices, which APIs to use how to use them, how to take advantage in the spatial logic of your application. It’s imperative that you produce a simple and effective spatial user experience. Simple enough to be usable. It’s also critical to gain some efficiencies of integrating properly with other business systems; your sales order system, your load management system, and also work potentially working with third-party data. We can assist with that part of the conversation. HERE comes with a set of terms of services we know very well and we can help you navigate those, and we can assist when consulting on cloud resourcing and deployment considerations.”

Dave: “You’ve got three basic options to consider. 1) Do-it-yourself; we can help you get started with the HERE documentation. We can get you set up with a billing account and get you started, and you can take it on your own with your own team. 2) Do-it-yourself with some consulting; and we can provide consulting on a number of topics to make sure you’re going down the right path and not wasting any development cycles. 3) You could consider outsourcing. We’d be glad to sit down and talk to you about scoping a project that takes advantage of the HERE Technologies to address your Logistics challenges.”