Kraft Foods Global Inc instituted a new synchronized trip program in 2008, Project MOST (Management of Optimized Sustainable Transportation). The project is designed to achieve a reduction in “empty miles” within Kraft’s US private fleet and top 50 carriers, Oracle announced.
One year later, Project MOST is the cornerstone of Kraft’s transportation sustainability efforts. It identifies the repeated patterns of truck movements into and out of Kraft distribution locations and then creates a series of trip segments for individual drivers and tractors in order to avoid trucks moving while empty, creating “empty miles”.
Kraft collaborated with Oracle to develop transportation functionality that enables the food company to perform strategic analysis of its network, identify ways to leverage freight, and form efficient routes for trucks.
Oracle Transportation Cooperative Routing, the new transportation optimization tool based on Oracle Transportation Management, ultimately put the more efficient “loops” into practice to successfully save miles and fuel for both the Kraft private fleet and its third-party carriers.
“Even before the increases in the price of oil, and the growing focus on sustainability, we knew we could improve the movement of trucks carrying products to our customers,” said Mike Cole, director–North America Transportation, Kraft Foods Inc. “The challenge is to identify the recurring patterns of truck movements when you have almost a million shipments a year, spread across a network covering over 25,000 potential origin and destination combinations, on any given day. After looking for commercial software that would meet our needs, we concluded that none existed, and so we decided to work with Oracle.”
