The client
FlexiForce Canada is a manufacturing company in British Columbia, Canada which serves customers throughout the Americas.
The need
The client had received a Strategic Innovation Fund grant to create a software application to optimize flat-deck trailer loading. They needed someone to collect data, communicate with the developers, and conduct quality assurance testing.
The solution
I began with collecting weights and dimensions for all products, which required building mathematical formulas because certain products nested within each other. I also mapped all the customer locations and assigned numeric values to each of them to assist with route planning.
We spent 12 months refining the output of the external development team’s software application, but ultimately the results produced were not satisfactory. The client asked me to devise a backup plan to save the project. I was able to produce a working solution in just eight hours, which led to a long-term engagement with the client following the conclusion of the project.
Instead of trying to simultaneously solve two NP-hard problems (travelling salesman and backpack problem), I went back to the original desire of the client to know how many trucks they would need to deliver the product being shipped each day. They had been using a rule-of-thumb of 1000 pounds of steel per linear foot of trailer space, so I used this rule and devised a way of converting lightweight plastic products on wooden pallets into steel equivalents based on the volume of space they occupied on the trailer.