Ricoh Europe SCM: truck and container planning, first time right

At Ricoh Europe SCM B.V., Martijn Spee manages transport for the EMEA region. His team’s main goal is simple to state and hard to do by hand: get the most out of every container and truck they pay for.

By implementing Cargo-Planner, everyone became an expert in truck planning. Planning trucks is now done first time right.

— Martijn Spee, Manager Transport EMEA, Ricoh Europe SCM B.V.

Before: manual calculations and a lot of email

Before Cargo-Planner, working out how an order would load meant manual simulations and calculations. Questions about whether an order would fit, and how to change it so it would, went back and forth by email between teams and customers.

Even in a well-run operation, planning mixed orders by hand is complex, and the occasional calculation error is very hard to eliminate completely. When one slips through, it shows up as capacity paid for and not used. Cargo-Planner replaced that with a standardised process: the same calculation, done the same way, by everyone who plans a load.

Two teams, one tool

Cargo-Planner is now used in two places at Ricoh:

• The warehouse team plans how the different types of orders load into trucks and containers.
• Customer support simulates orders and shipments before they are placed, so they can advise dealers on how to change an order to fill a container better.

The second use is the one that moves the work upstream. Instead of discovering after the fact that a shipment leaves space unused, the planning team and customer service can show a dealer what their order will look like loaded, and suggest changes while there is still time to make them.

The result

The manual simulations and calculations are gone, and so is most of the email that came with them.

• 10% more efficient planning.
• 0.5 FTE saved end to end.
• Truck plans done first time right.

It enables your organization to be much more efficient, and avoids waste of communication, misinterpretations, and discussions.

— Martijn Spee

Ricoh plans both trucks and containers in Cargo-Planner. See how other manufacturers use it on the manufacturers page.