Title: Improved route planning in order to avoid empty transports

Subject: Degree project in Logistics, the Business Administration and Economics Program, 30 credits

Authors: Linus Jönsson & Andreas Rosborg

Tutor: Petra Andersson

Keywords: Empty transports, fill rate, route planning, economic savings, CO₂ emissions.

Background: Increasing the logistic productivity is one way to lower the costs for a company. This could be done by improving the vehicle utilization, by increasing the fill rate of the trucks, and/or optimize routes. If companies succeed with route optimizing, the trucks can drive more resource efficient through for example shorter distance, shorter time or with higher fill rates. A working route optimizing should also reduce the number of trucks in use, the number of miles and/or the time in traffic plus the emission of CO₂, which originates from the trucks.

Purpose: The purpose is to identify the present situation regarding empty transports between the terminals in Malmö and the distribution centre Ystad, in order to find underlying factors to the low productivity. The research will also investigate how Posten Logistik can reduce the identified empty transports. In addition to this, the thesis will present savings in form of salary-, propellant- and truck costs that the solutions will bring but also how these improvement proposals will affect the CO₂ emissions within Posten Logistik.

Methodology: This thesis is a case-study, performed at Posten Logistik AB in Malmö and Ystad.

Conclusions: Six routes have been identified containing empty transports and the new created routes have eliminated the empty transports on all of those six routes. The two factors that do affect the empty transports are, time constraints and risk aversion. Another factor that has been identified for causing empty transports is the route planning. The fill rate on all except one of them, have been increased and the total decrease in driving distance is 9 927, 3 miles.

The costs for the six original routes has decreased as a result of the new suggested routes, the total economic savings is 802 142 SEK. Another effect of the suggested routes is a decrease in CO₂ emissions, for a total of 85 637 kg CO₂.