Toyota Improves Delivery Routing

Toyota Material Handling, USA Inc. is using Paragon Software Systems Inc.'s automatic routing system to plan and optimize delivery routes to customers throughout North America. The software reduces planning tasks from several hours to minutes and allows more detailed shipping information to be visible throughout the organization.

Third-party contractors deliver Toyota forklifts to Toyota Material Handling’s 188 dealer locations and more than 1,000 customer locations. The company relies on the Paragon solution to control the routes and help direct each load to its destination. There are no fixed routes, as the number of routes and deliveries are determined by customer orders. “We use Paragon several times a day to schedule and route our outbound deliveries to customers. We rely on its optimization engine to determine the best route for our forklifts,” says Michael J.Gunn, National Distribution, IT Dealer Relations and Support Manager, Toyota Material Handling. “The greatest advantage of the Paragon system is that it can perform the complex task of optimizing routes in seconds,” says Gunn. “This task would normally take hours if we were to plan routes manually. It also enables our shipping decisions to be clearly understood by others in the organization. We are no longer reliant on one person’s expertise. The system has allowed us to extend our capabilities by enabling others in the team to build optimal loads.”

Gunn continues, “We wanted a systematic freight control system that would interface easily with our SAP system.”

Paragon