News & Media

MARSEILLE, France – March 22, 2023 – DER-Trans Logistics is deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to help plan and optimize its customers’ finished vehicle logistics (FVL). The logistics company is leveraging DCbrain’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution to meet its digital transformation goals and improve the quality of its logistics services to automakers.

Achieving operational excellence with AI

Operational excellence is at the heart of the culture of DER-Trans Logistics, which is committed to continuously elevating the quality of service for its customers. By retaining the AI ​​specialist, DER-Trans Logistics is able to simplify the planning of distribution schemes for its FVL activity. DER-Trans Logistics aims to digitize its processes, improve the processing of transportation orders and consolidate distribution rounds through better use of its fleet of car carriers via optimized assignments.

Digitalizing its transportation flows makes it possible for DER-Trans Logistics to move from static optimization to dynamic optimization and to automate various parts of the operation. The dynamic optimization hinges on the principle of digital twins and foundational upstream standardization work.

A tool to match the expertise of DER-Trans Logistics’s experts

DER-Trans Logistics has chosen to provide planners with a tool complimentary of their knowledge, helping to standardize and unify work processes from one agency to another. The DCbrain solution, coupled with DER-Trans Logistics’s transportation management system (TMS), offers a global vision of the operational flow. This solution will enable testing, factor in constraints and provide teams with a decision-making tool, all while providing faster calculation times to help make informed decisions in transportation planning.

International support to create an efficient supply chain

Transportation flows are complex, and their planning is based on a multitude of evolving constraints that require constant rethinking and adjustments to planning. DER-Trans Logistics strives to make its supply chains more efficient and adaptive and has decided to implement this support solution within its platforms in France, as well as in four other European countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic.

Convinced of the need to adapt rapidly, the local teams are adopting the solution to improve their responsiveness to unforeseen events related to order delivery. Collaboration between the planning and field teams will create a more efficient and dynamic supply chain solution.

Benjamin de Buttet, COO, DCbrain, said: “Artificial intelligence allows planners to go further, so it must be able to integrate their expertise more quickly. The TMS-DCbrain association will evolve to bring even more flexibility to users.”

Thomas Maître, chief project officer, FVL, DER-Trans Logistics, said: “Rethinking route planning has led us to challenge our ways of working, to streamline planning and capitalize on the benefits of AI in automating planners’ tasks.”