Unused truck capacity is one of the biggest problems the logistics industry faces. Approximately 40 percent of the truck loading spaces in Europe are not filled, causing the industry a loss of over 100 billion euros. In addition to its marketplace for combining loads into attractive tours, LoadFox Market, the Munich-based start-up LoadFox has now developed another innovative tool – the LoadFox Planner. With the help of artificial intelligence, it combines trailers, trucks, loads and drivers to create a digital dispatching plan, thus starting with the first planning step. LoadFox will present the new tool at its booth 110 in hall A5 at the transport logistic, which takes place from 04th to 07th June in Munich.
“The job profile of the dispatcher will change,” says Sebastian Sorger, CEO of LoadFox, about the new development. “He will move from classic planner to final decision-maker, because LoadFox Planner will take over the very time-consuming combinatorics, while the dispatcher can check, edit or reject the results,” continues Sorger. The algorithms behind the planner learn from decisions made and can recognize patterns that make the dispatching plan even more accurate. The aim of the LoadFox Planner is to reduce the workload of dispatchers and to increase profitability through high-quality planning.
As soon as a finished dispatching plan has been created and cleared by the dispatcher, the LoadFox Planner shall also support the handling of exceptions. If, for example, there is a delay during a tour due to traffic jams or other external factors, this can be taken into account in the dispatching plan with just a few clicks. For this purpose, the dispatcher can specify rules in advance that take effect in these exceptional situations.
With LoadFox Planner, the company has further developed its business model, ride-sharing for freight. Instead of just improving the load utilization of a truck, the Planner focuses on optimizing the entire fleet. This way, dispatchers are able to reduce their workload one step earlier, directly in the planning of trucks, trailers, drivers and loads. The dispatcher manages the planning according to company-specific requirements and thus optimizes costs, capacity utilization, time and driver needs according to the company’s own strategies. The product is intended as an easy to use SaaS solution. “Efficiency improvements have already been demonstrated with the prototype for several pilot customer,” says Sebastian Sorger.
The development of the new dispatching tool is being carried out together with pilot customers who, in addition to a time-saving and revenue-enhancing optimization tool, were also looking
for a way to counter the acute shortage of drivers in the industry. Schnellecke Transport AG is one of the pilot customers. Mandy Beck, head of Potential Management, aims to use LoadFox Planner to ensure that “freight bookings and route optimizations go hand in hand in the future. We want to ease the strain of routine work on our dispatchers.”
The LoadFox Planner is available from 2020 with selected partners in the beta phase, for which applications can be submitted from the start of the transport logistic trade fair.
LoadFox GmbH is a Munich-based start-up company for the development of digital solutions for logistics. The founding partners are MAN Truck & Bus and the Boston Consulting Group. LoadFox offers its users the opportunity to share loading space and freight capacities via the LoadFox Market platform, thus countering the shortage of loading space and drivers. The latest product development LoadFox Planner, for the AI supported creation of dispatching plans, is currently in the pilot phase. For its digital solutions, LoadFox was awarded Logistics Start-up of the Year 2018 by the Austrian magazine Verkehr and is rated as one of the most innovative start-ups in Germany by Forbes. For registration and further information please visit loadfox.eu.
