Project “EARL” was recognized as a CSCMP Innovation award finalist for solving costly transportation volatility challenges.
Franklin, TN – (July 15, 2022). Kimberly-Clark’s Project “EARL” (Early Tendering and Leveling) is a collaboration with Transportation | Warehouse Optimization (T|WO) and ProvisionAi. EARL has successfully solved a significant and costly problem many consumer-good companies face: deployment volatility.
“EARL” has cut the need for spot transportation buys, increased load fill, and reduced volume spikes at the shipping dock while maintaining or improving customer fill rates. In addition, “EARL” has saved millions of dollars by smoothing out network flow.
“We’re excited to see our innovative technologies highlighted by a prestigious organization like CSCMP,” says ProvisionAi co-founder Dr. Jeff Schutt. “We firmly believe that this effort will foundationally change how organizations think about supply planning and execution and are thankful to have a great partner like Kimberly-Clark.”
Project “EARL” uses ProvisionAi’s LevelLoad transportation planning system to constrain deployment plans created by a leading supply-planning system.
Over 30 days, LevelLoad pulls high-priority requirements early, pushes lower-priority SKUs later to level transportation requirements, and ensures that shipping and receiving capabilities are respected network-wide. In addition, LevelLoad triggers early shipment tendering–before the loads’ actual content is defined.
AutoO2, the load builder from T|WO, takes the tenders that LevelLoad initiated multiple days earlier and defines what product is to ship on each using the current planning system requirements and their priority. This postponement strategy ensures the right mix of high-priority products is shipped.
The innovation winner will be announced at the CSCMP Edge Conference in Nashville on September 18-21, 2022. The EARL team will present the process – innovative technology that includes Operations Research and AI techniques, as well as significant savings.
The CSCMP (Council of Supply Chain Management Professional) Supply Chain Innovation Award recognizes the top innovative teams who can communicate their significant and proven achievements that not only “positively affect the return on investment and performance at their own
companies, but who can also give back to the industry and their peers by sharing their stories.”
Since 1992, Transportation | Warehouse Optimization (T|WO) has provided AutoO2 (Automatic Order Optimization) load building software to minimize supply chain transportation costs. AutoO2 uses advanced mathematics to get the most product on trucks in a way that cannot be achieved manually.
ProvisionAi is a team of mathematical and operational experts who developed LevelLoad. LevelLoad uses a combination of advanced optimization techniques & reinforcement learning to create a long-horizon solution for transporting products to customer-facing distribution centers.