Zoolyx, the first private veterinary laboratory in Belgium, offers a complete and evolving range of tests to their customers. Ranging from hematology, microbiology, cytology to genetic analyses, Zoolyx provides these services for veterinarians. To provide a strong customer service, they need swift blood sample pickup drives. Solvice helped Zoolyx in integrating their field service execution with advanced and automatic scheduling of their operations.
Zoolyx receives incoming pickup jobs 24/7. Their service-level agreement forces them every request received before 12pm to pickup before 5pm. Some jobs are attributed to some drivers and the planning should take these into account while minimizing predicted travel time. Historically, drivers have had their specific region. Automatic optimization wouldn't care for that, as optimal routes can sequence jobs across multiple regions for one driver. But knowing the region still has some benefits to the actual travel results, so taking these regions into consideration to some extent is of value.
Solvice performed a detailed business case analysis for Zoolyx, considering their current planning principles, the prevailing data architecture, and the best-practices in real-time blood drive planning. In this analysis, the body of work from a representative month was used to simulate the impact of a real-time optimization engine on the pickup schedules. The focus of this simulation lied primarily on sequencing of new incoming jobs.
After this analysis phase, Zoolyx decided to integrate their ERP system with the advance route optimization engine OnRoute to automate all the planning decisions throughout the day. Real-time optimization is mimicked through an integration in which every 5 minutes the solver reroutes every driver because of new information. The driver only receives the next job to do, as the schedule might literally change all the time. This results in a swifter handling of new orders as compared to the previous manual planning approach, which saved a lot of time to the dispatchers of Zoolyx.