Overview

Calidus Total Logistics (C-TL) is a transportation and logistics solution that reduces costs by optimising transport management across depots, manufacturers, retailers & carriers, providing central planning and management services. C-TL focuses on improving the whole transport management process, including order generation, planning, execution, administration, and payment. The host system provides interfaces to customer systems, sophisticated order entry templates and reporting. Links to transport planning tools, real-time tracking and execution tools and Oracle Financials accounting package, support the whole process. C-TL allows all or just selected functions of the system to be utilised according to customers’ particular needs.

The C-TL system incorporates several elements, order entry, order management, routing / scheduling, tracking and continuous improvement. These enable complete visibility of the optimisation process.

Order entry can be achieved in several ways, electronic interfaces enable the process to be fully automated, manual entry allows last minute requirements to be met and the ability to enter these via the internet allows flexibility and simplicity.

The order management functionality enables the system to create point to point orders encompassing the collection location, delivery location, time windows for these to be achieved and the vital information about the products and their size, weight and quantity. These items known as transport instructions are then available for routing.

Based on specific requirements set by the customer’s priorities the system takes the transport instructions and optimises them into trips. During the optimisation process the system interrogates available resources, all locations to be visited, specific rules and regulations and the laws that the vehicles operate under and produces the most efficient schedule.

Orders can be uploading through electronic data interchange (EDI) or manually. This functionality allows the planners to add emergency trips to the vehicles giving a flexible real time service to the customer.

In order that the system is available to provide full optimisation it is positioned with a strong infrastructure backbone and is supported by a dedicated Applications Management team. The main applications can be hosted on the P-740 mirrored servers within specialised data centres. This enables the service to be available twenty-four hours a day seven days a week on a high availability basis.