Dedicated Fleet Optimization Strategies

Running a dedicated fleet has its advantages including predictability, guaranteed capacity, and increased visibility into shipments. Dedicated carriers can also experience significant savings when optimal lanes and loads are contracted. The key to success is in automating those decisions to ensure continuous optimization of your dedicated fleet network.

Traditionally, most dedicated fleets do not begin as cost-savings initiatives, but rather, emerge from a real or perceived need for service, capacity, or operational flexibility. Once launched, these fleets quickly become institutionalized and part of a company’s culture — whether they’re cost-effective and right-sized or not. This is why periodic evaluation of your dedicated fleet is an essential task whether you’re currently operating a fleet or just getting started.

Leveraging the Optimal Dynamics platform can help you optimize your existing fleet or even evaluate if starting a dedicated fleet is the best decision for your business. An optimization solution for your dedicated fleet can help you create the perfect fleet strategy inclusive of:

• Fleet size
• Delivery territories
• Master routes
• Service window strategies
• Plus more

Not only does Optimal Dynamics help you create the right strategy for your business through the platform’s Plan solution, but it can also help you put those plans into action through a seamless connection with Execute.

Continue reading to learn about optimization strategies for dedicated carriers, and contact us if you’d like to explore leveraging Optimal Dynamics to help confidently make strategic business decisions around optimizing your dedicated fleet.

Questions to Ask Before Starting Dedicated Fleet Operations

Deciding the best path forward for your business requires a great deal of planning and strategic needs assessment. As noted above, fleets sometimes emerge from real needs, but they can also result from mere perception. Obviously, organizations should always make fleet-related decisions based on real needs, and doing so starts by asking the right questions.

If you’re considering starting a dedicated service, these four questions can help you confirm if your need is real or not:

• Are contract carriers readily available for the lanes I need to cover?
• Do I need to provide services that are not readily available in the contract carrier market? (Examples can include back-of-store deliveries, “key drop” or unique security requirements, driver assembly services, and high per-load drop count or small drop size.)
• Do short lengths of haul and high repeatability yield high potential utilization?
• Is the fleet option reasonably cost-effective compared to available alternatives?

That last question is the most important, but it’s traditionally the most difficult to answer. Now, thanks to modern technology and the existence of Artificial Decision Intelligence, you can access advanced insights that help you answer this key question plus others.

The Insights a Dedicated Fleet Optimization Analysis Delivers

An advanced solution like Plan by Optimal Dynamics can take your historical data, driver requirements, and other inputs to yield insights that are invaluable when optimizing your dedicated fleet. The right technology can help you identify:

• The ideal fleet size for maximizing value.
• The most strategic locations for domiciles.
• The lanes and volumes that are best suited to a given fleet size and common carriage.

Advanced planning technology can also help you conduct a fleet analysis to understand the impact of key operational constraints or other long-term planning initiatives. For example, a sensitivity analysis can account for shipment and load visibility, hours of operation, the impact of drop trailer programs, transit time or road speed adjustments, rate and fuel inflation, and growth strategies.

Ongoing Dedicated Fleet Optimization

Optimizing your dedicated fleet operation isn’t just an important task when you’re deciding whether to start a fleet or not. Periodic evaluation of your dedicated fleet is critical to ensure that it remains cost-effective and right-sized. Remember that many fleets become institutionalized and a part of a company’s culture over time. There’s nothing wrong with that — if the fleet is still delivering value in its current state. Ongoing fleet optimization analysis is how you determine if the value is still there.

Strategic transportation planning tools like those offered by Optimal Dynamics can help you conduct two different types of analysis. First, they can assist with the deep complex studies that inform long-term strategic decisions. Think of this first type of analysis as big-picture, informing decisions that will be made over months or years.

Second, these solutions can support quick-hitting analyses that can be used for shorter-term decision-making. This would include more nuanced decisions to be made over weeks or even days.

As outlined in the introduction, these analyses can help you confidently answer questions on fleet size, delivery territories, master routes, service window strategies, and other key factors. Without real-time optimization, you risk the institutionalization that can lead to fleets that are neither cost-effective nor the right size.

Bridging the Gap Between Planning and Execution

Planning is essential to building a strategy that drives business outcomes, including money saved. But even the best plans are worthless without the ability to implement them and realize those key outcomes.

At Optimal Dynamics, our platform offers a seamless connection from strategic plans (built using our Plan solution) to implementation (through Execute). For example, Plan helps you answer questions like:

• Should we have (or create) a dedicated fleet?
• What’s the right size for our dedicated fleet?
• What are the right volumes, rates, and lanes?

Once you have answers to strategic ‘what-if’ questions, you can easily and quickly turn them into action. By automating dispatch decisions via Optimal Dynamics, you can rest assured that every driver-to-load match is the best fit for your network requirements and current commitments. Via decision automation, Optimal Dynamics customers are seeing tremendous gains in productivity increases, ultimately handling more volume without the need to hire more staff. Automation is helping fleets transform their operations and uplevel employees as they shift away from routine planning decisions.

Continually return to re-evaluate your dedicated fleet based on new information and conditions. During re-evaluation, you want to ask questions like, “Are we still doing the right things with our dedicated fleet?” and “Are we still executing efficiently and effectively based on the most recent information and conditions?”

The Optimal Dynamics platform is unique in the marketplace by offering solutions that empower fleet management to:

• Analyze strategic planning decisions
• Automate and optimize everyday decisions
• Implement plans seamlessly.

These solutions remain helpful as your organization continuously analyzes its dedicated fleet to ensure it’s delivering value, while maximizing utilization and revenue potential.

Make the Right Dedicated Fleet Decisions With Optimal Dynamics

Don’t fall into the trap of building a dedicated fleet based on perceived need or maintaining a fleet simply because it’s institutionalized. Dedicated fleet optimization allows for regular assessments and data-driven analysis of your network to ensure it is aligned with your most pressing internal priorities. When you automate and optimize the decisions your dedicated fleet team makes, you’re able to build the most efficient tours, reduce costs, and increase loaded miles.

At Optimal Dynamics, our platform provides you with the power of Artificial Decision Intelligence to optimize your dedicated fleet and provide even greater value to your shippers. Schedule a demo to discover what fleet optimization can do for your business.

Optimal Dynamics is proud to join Uber Freight at the Deliver 2024 Conference to co-present on harnessing the power of Dedicated Fleets. Join us on September 10 to learn how Uber Freight and Optimal Dynamics partner to drive ultimate value by optimizing dedicated fleet efficiency to drive high utilization and strong ROI.