Maximizing Your Source and Risk Assessment
At Logistix Solutions, we constantly tailor our distribution and transportation software, to meet our users' evolving needs for sourcing and risk assessment, resiliency, and sustainability.
This year alone we have provided over twenty new updates to the Logix Supply Chain Optimization software. These updates include new features or improvements to existing capabilities. They often also positively impacting solution speed and ease of use.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions calculations have long been a feature in Logix™. However, now through our Design Center and Analytics tools, scoring alternative supply chains for sustainability are more visible and presentable than ever.
Navigating Transportation Source and Risk Assessment In A Changing World
Today's world is increasingly considering the impact of supply chain and transportation on the environment. It is important to be able to see these levels in your current network vs an optimized scenario. It's also important to focus on building a resilient and competitive supply chain.
Optimizing sourcing, ocean freight costs and ports of entry is a particularly important topic for our Logix™ users. Container ocean freight costs have doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled this year. Our users are scrambling to find solutions. That includes finding alternative ports of entry to solve the log jams at various ports of entry. In many cases, container ships can wait days or weeks to off load containers. This situation creates uncertainty, delays and shortages in the supply chain.
Logix™ provides a scorecard display of CO2 and Greenhouse Gas emission levels. In doing so, it does a comparison of your baseline network to any alternative supply chain. Industry standards for metric tons of emissions for various types of road transport, rail, ocean, and air are part of the data embedded in Logix™. It all helps to provide an estimate of emissions by mode of transport.
Maximizing Your Available Space
Logix™ also calculates average emissions for warehouse and storage facilities, using those metrics. Sourcing standards are often more difficult to define. It is often left to the user to input by manufacturing plant, or supplier in the “Supplier” record, to calculate total emissions. This applies for any Logix™ baseline or alternative solution.
Users can modify any of these standards in the Logix™ “Default Record”. Logix™ calculates emissions, adjusting for the size of the vehicle in its fleet sizing and transport optimization solvers. The software also does so for the size of the warehouse or distribution facility in distribution network design solutions. The end result of simulation or optimization can be viewed in the Analytics Dashboard, with a side by side comparison. Score your current supply chain vs any of your optimizations or alternative networks.
The benefits are not only for cost savings or service improvements, but also for CO2/GHG emission for the entire supply chain. That includes for suppliers, inbound transport, facilities, or outbound transport.
Logix™ users optimize their supply chains for inbound freight and outbound transport. Often it can optimize both simultaneously for a total solution. In order to improve the optimization process and provide even more information, users can add service time estimates in the Freight Rate record for any supplier to port, warehouse or distribution center.
In addition to providing sourcing and risk assessment, resiliency, and sustainability services through the Logix™ software, Logix™ makes it possible for users can add dwell time for any port. As a result, users can better gauge delays in the supply chain due to log jams at the port. This can be particularly relevant with backups at ports.
The Difference Logix™ Can Make For You.
Logix™ can optimize the entire supply chain including sourcing and risk assessment. It works using either prescriptive sourcing (i.e., you provide the percentages of each source for inbound product flows based on outbound volume) or optimized sourcing (i.e., Logix™ optimizes the inbound volumes, suppliers and costs based on inbound freight costs, product pricing and port of entry fees and costs).
We’ve also recently added the ability to select which ports of entry are to be included in a simulation or optimization. Logix™ rates each inbound shipment from the supplier, through each of the ports of entry you designate. Simply import or enter the allowable ports of entry, “select” any of the ports you want evaluated as part of the process, or leave them all “un-selected” to include all of the ports in the evaluation.
To ensure that Logix™ only evaluates certain ports tied to only some of your suppliers or distribution centers, use the Region Link to match suppliers, ports and/or distribution centers. You can use “wild card” entries to make this feature even more powerful and flexible. (i.e., a supplier with Region Link S* will match a port or distribution center with Region Link “South”.)
Read the full article here: New Features and Users in the News - September 2021
