Introduction to Supplier Milk Runs

QAD Enterprise Edition includes support for the concept of a milk run approach to supplier deliveries, including the ability to optimize the efficient use of vehicle capacity.

In a milk run, your own vehicles or vehicles belonging to a logistics provider follow a prescribed route to one or more suppliers. They pick up parts or materials and deliver them to your manufacturing sites. One challenge of milk runs is to avoid sending multiple partially loaded vehicles. With planning, it should be possible to consolidate loads into fewer vehicles—considerably reducing transportation costs. However, this becomes a complex task where supplier schedules are involved, and often involves manual management with spreadsheets.

Customers can take advantage of Supplier Milk Run features to automatically generate milk run pickup sheets for their transportation providers. This functionality supports both discrete purchase orders and two types of supplier schedules:

You can generate pickup sheets in two ways:

• Using an auto-create program that generates pickup sheets for a user-specified site, supplier network, and planner ID. You can create sheets for multiple pickup dates. Optionally, you can confirm the sheets while they are being created. When pickup sheets are confirmed, their associated supplier schedule releases are immediately updated and can be transmitted using EDI, print, or fax.

• With a maintenance program that lets you create, modify, and confirm pickup sheets for a single date and supplier transportation network.

Both programs offer the option to run a QAD-provided or custom-designed full-truckload optimization program. This program can include your company’s rules for calculating the best way to achieve full truckloads—eliminating even more of the manual process. See Optimization Rules.

Regardless of the creation method you use, the same maintenance program lets you make manual changes to the system-generated pickup sheet. For example, if the vehicle is significantly under capacity, you can add quantities from the next day’s schedules for one or more suppliers to fill the truck. The system adjusts the schedule for the next day to subtract the additional quantities from the requirements.

Once you have confirmed the sheets either automatically or manually, the system creates new schedule releases to let your suppliers know about any schedule changes made as a result of pickup sheet modifications. It also adds a reference to the pickup sheet ID on the latest release.