Load optimizer (Plan)

The Plan page looks at every shipment that is ready to move and every truck that is free to move it, and proposes complete mission plans — which truck should carry which shipments, at what utilization, and at what estimated fuel cost. You compare a handful of named scenarios, pick one, and send it as offers. Drivers keep the final word: an applied plan becomes ordinary mission offers that each driver accepts or declines from the Teamster app.

The Plan page needs the missions: create permission — Company Owners, Data Admins, and Dispatchers have it by default.

Note

This is not the Optimize button on Routes & Load Plans. That one packs an existing load plan against one vehicle. The Plan page works fleet-wide: it decides which trucks and which groupings in the first place.

What feeds the optimizer

The quality of the proposals is exactly the quality of your data. Before relying on the Plan page, make sure:

1. Drivers are paired with trucks on Fleet Assignments — only a driver with an assigned vehicle can be offered a mission, and only available driver + available vehicle pairs are considered. A driver already out on an active mission is skipped.
2. Vehicles have payload capacities (and volume, where relevant) — capacity is what the packing respects.
3. Shipments have weights. A shipment without a recorded weight always “fits” and is flagged as unverified weight on the mission card — the optimizer cannot protect you from what it cannot measure.
4. Locations have coordinates. Shipments whose origin or destination location has no latitude/longitude are left out and counted in the inputs line.
5. Fuel logs are recorded. The fuel price comes from your last 90 days of fuel logs (cost ÷ liters); with no logs it falls back to a default. The inputs line tells you which source was used.

A truck’s starting position is resolved in this order: its latest GPS position → the destination of its driver’s last completed mission → your own company location. Distances are straight-line estimates with a road factor, not road routing.

Running it

1. Open Plan (next to Missions) and select Run optimizer.
2. Read the inputs line first: how many trucks and shipments were considered, the fuel price and its source, and anything skipped. If it says 0 trucks, fix Fleet Assignments before anything else.
3. Compare the scenario tabs. Each is a complete plan built with a different priority:
   • Cheapest — lowest total fuel cost.
   • Fullest trucks — highest tonnage utilization per truck.
   • Fewest trips — maximum consolidation into the fewest missions.
   • Nearest first — trucks closest to each pickup go first, minimizing empty running. The ★ Recommended badge marks the best blend of cost, utilization, and coverage. When two strategies produce the identical plan, only one tab is shown — fewer than four tabs is normal, not an error.
4. On each tab, the totals strip gives you fuel cost, total km, empty km, trip count, and mean utilization. Each mission card shows the truck and driver, the shipments consolidated onto it, a utilization bar (red means over capacity), the empty-run distance, and the estimated cost.
5. Check the Unassigned shipments panel. Nothing is ever silently dropped: a shipment is either heavier than any available truck or there was no truck left with room. Those need a manual decision — a different vehicle, a split, or waiting for the fleet to free up.

Sending a scenario

1. Select Send offers on the scenario you want, and confirm. Each proposed mission becomes a real offer to that truck’s driver — the same offers you would create by hand from the Shipments page, with the note “Plan optimizer”.
2. The results panel shows, per mission, what was created (with mission IDs) and anything skipped or failed — a plan can go stale between running and sending (a driver went off duty, a shipment got offered by a colleague); whatever is still valid lands, and the rest is reported.
3. Follow the offers on Missions as usual: drivers accept or decline from their phone, and accepted missions drive shipment statuses, vehicle status, and driver status automatically.

Shipments that already sit in an open offer or active mission are excluded from the next run, so re-running after sending shows you only what is still unplanned.

Caution

The cost figures are fuel-only estimates — straight-line distance with a road factor, a consumption figure per vehicle (or a per-type default when the vehicle’s own consumption isn’t recorded), and the derived fuel price. Use them to compare scenarios against each other, not as an invoice-grade cost.

Scenario: Monday morning, thirteen shipments are ready and seven trucks are free. You run the optimizer; Fullest trucks is recommended — five trips, 73% mean utilization, one truck carrying two El Jadida → Nouaceur loads at exactly 100% of its 30-tonne payload. Two shipments sit unassigned: one heavier than anything in the fleet, one with no truck left. You send the recommended scenario, the offers reach five drivers’ phones, and you handle the two leftovers by hand — one split across tomorrow’s runs, one assigned to a borrowed vehicle.