A smarter route to every doorstep

60% reduction in total travel time and distance

The setting

A large retailer with hundreds of shops throughout Greece sells appliances that require installation from a network of external technicians. Each day thousands of orders take place, each with certain requirements such as service time window, and each one needs to be assigned to a technician.

The challenge

Build a system that will assign orders to service crews and will produce optimal routes in real time that:

1. satisfy all order constraints such as time windows, capacities and required skills
2. minimize travel time and distance
3. maximize utilization

Why a custom solution

The retailer first worked with a vendor that offered a routing product, backed by forward-deployed engineers. The product could not be adapted to how their operations actually work: technician skills, time windows, capacities and constant changes through the day. That is when they came to Optimium for a custom solution, built around their operations rather than around a product.

The work

A solver API was developed that received order and service crew data, and produced optimal routes as well as map visualizations and AI assisted observability of the whole operation. The solver involved a customized search algorithm that would meet the given requirements and constraints. Additionally, a separate map service was installed that provided all the necessary distance and travel time data to the solver. The assignment network appears in Figure 1, and example optimal crew routes appear in Figure 2.

The results

• Production solver and analytics engine for service crew routing.
• 60% reduction in total travel time and distance.
• 45% increase in utilization.
• Dashboard with interactive maps and analytics for operations observability.
• Real-time monitoring of service crews.