Use a visual traffic planning tool that simplifies resource allocation

In the Mandata world, colours play a critical role. Highlighting upcoming events against drivers, vehicles and trailers. Making planning simpler for the traffic planner. Who knew?

Transport Managers and Traffic Planners are under a lot of pressure to work smarter.  When you’re planning jobs today for days or weeks ahead, you need reliable and up to date information to hand, to help you make the right decisions, fast.

If you’re planning on whiteboards or spreadsheets, or using multiple systems, you may find it hard to get jobs and loads planned in the time you have, particularly if the answers you need are not there when you need them.

All too often, the simplest tasks take the most time. Hard to find information can lead to more questions, resulting in a lot of stress and wasted time trying to find the answers.

If you’re struggling with your load planning workload, we can help. 

Mandata brings all the information you need into one place. It brings your operation alive in a colourful visual way, answering key-critical questions to make the traffic planning task easier for you.

Resource allocation is one of the most difficult things to get right.

Which driver? Which sub-contractor? Which vehicle? Which trailer?  Fundamental questions that need answering for tens, hundreds and even thousands of jobs the traffic planner plans every day.

With Mandata it’s easy to keep driver and sub-contractor availability up-to-date using a Driver Calendar.  Availability and events such as maintenance and MOT’s are also logged against vehicles and trailers within the system.

All of this information comes together within the Mandata Traffic Pad (in both the Mandata TMS or Go) to simplify the load planning task across the traffic desk. If there’s more than one depot everyone can see the same information.  And, as resources are allocated there’s no chance the driver or vehicle can be allocated more than once.  It means everyone has visibility.

Here’s how:

1. You’re about to start planning jobs today for tomorrow or days / weeks ahead.

2. To do this you need to see which jobs or loads are still to plan, and who and what resources are available to do the job, such as vehicles.

3. In Mandata, jobs created appear to simply drag onto the load or vehicle.   You’ll see all your vehicles and which ones have dates logged against them for the dates you’re planning, as they’re colour-coded.

4. If drivers or vehicles have events logged against them, colours change to show you.

In the following example you can see a vehicle has a standard 6-week service coming up during the dates you’re looking to allocate work. There’s another vehicle with an event planned against it too.

In the Mandata planning world, colour is used as a mechanism to visualise availability, simplifying resource allocation.

How colour works wonders in our transport management systems

In the Mandata TMS there’s flexibility to customise colours to standardise meaning across the traffic office. This means everyone understands what a colour represents.

In Mandata Go there’s a simpler approach.  It’s all about making information available at a glance. Avoiding any confusion, or errors.

Would your Traffic Planners find this useful?

In a recent survey, 60% of Traffic Planners said they saved more than 10 hours per week using Mandata when they moved from another system or manual way of planning, to a Mandata Transport Management system. 100% of people said they’d saved more than 5 hours per week.