LA, being loyal to its philosophy of developing simple, process-based and dynamic applications, LO Transportation Management solution. LO, different than classical applications, is focusing on customer-specific processes and solutions. Having the long-time experience and knwoledge of the transporation sector as a backbone; thus develop an open-to-configure system considering this backbone might specialize for different customers.

Today, companies differentiate from each other with corporate culture and knowhow. LA, pays attention to the customer’s corporate culture in developing its solutions.

LO’s  most important advantage is its dynamic and configurable structure. Process owners (process analyst, logisticien, engineers etc.) may shape their own processes upto their need, sticking with the backbone. They can design screens, activate parametric functions or add-on new parameters.

LO is a solution platform and has only one version everywhere. There can be different screens or processes in different customers thus LO responds with one version.

Technology

LO works on LAWEP platform which was also developed by LA. LAWEP is a platform which was developed on Microsoft’s advanced devlopment tool .NET. LO can work on Oracle and SQLServer databases. It has easy to manage and use interfaces with its web based structure. At the same tiem due to its technology of WPF, it works on the client and shows the best performance ever for a web based application. On LAWEP, users can design their own screens, generate reports out of all screens and generate graphical reports easily.

Why LO ?

Software which cannot generate reports is not a “Solution”

Due to development team’s longtime experience in software and consulting, main philosophy is software which cannot  generate reports is not a good solution. Therefore, since its early development stages, LO was designed to generate many web based reports from each and every screen. Generating graphical and formatted reports in LO is a very easy job for an end user.

Easy Communication

Software becomes more crucial for our daily life today. Communicating for a good software with other units is a necessity. LO has easy to use screens designed for communication with other applications (CRM, ERP...), business partners. On the other hand, e-mail, export service, web service provides users to communicate any report in the system with others.

User – Friendly

On the screens, all fields can be removed, added or changed without developing any code. These kind of modifications also have user-friendly interfaces.

User access rights can be assigned to the smallest field in any screen. Also, user access rights can be assigned to some specific, required data. Reports, graphical and screen reports work on  user basis.

All screens can be transfered to MS Excel or can be printed out in any desired format.

Users are able to generate their own queries and reports on user-friendly interfaces.

Functionality

Fleet Management

Fleet management is the module that can manage all vehicle and driver information. Vehicles and drivers  are two components of this module, and they are handled in this module with all details.

Vehicles: Documents, registration information, rental and contract information, insurance information, accounting information, maintenance management, capacity, cost, accidents, fines, fuel and other expenses, tyre management (serial and position tracking), warnings for any expirable documents, etc.

Drivers: Documents, license information, health information, work history, training information, accidents, fines, performance and bonus management,  warnings for any expirable documents.

Blacklists can be recorded for both vehicles and drivers. The blacklist inclusions will be prohibited from any operation.

In fleet management, Service Management can keep track of maintenance information and work orders. Maintenance plan can be created for any period for all vehicles and can generate warnings accordingly. Work orders are created against maintenance plan or independent from maintenance plan. Work order contains all the details (equipments, inventory parts, non-inventory parts, resources, costs) of the work done.

Transportation Management

Transportation management module manages transportation orders, trips, delivery notes, waybills etc. as seen below.

LO keeps track of different parties in the system. These parties provide the system flexibility it requires.

Depositor, Vehicle Owner, Transport Sender, Customer, Insurance Company, Insurance Agency, Carrier, Customes, Payee, Transit DC, Subcontractor, Driver, Supplier.

In LO, a party is defined with a unique tax no and can be a supplier, a customer, a depositor etc. at the same time. Also a party may have many addresses in the system; such as invoice address, shipment address 1, shipment address 2, shipment address 3 etc.

There is an extremely flexible relationship between financial centers and logistics centers and zones. A part of a building may report to a financial center whereas the other part of the logistics center may report to another financial center. Or two logistics center may report to a financial center whereas another logistics center may report to another financial center. Some orders may be received from a logistics center and it may be picked from the zone of another logistics center and may be shipped to another logistics center. The process may work using more than one transit warehouses or none. However, the relationships impact the distribution of cost and revenues of trips, orders, drivers and vehicles to logistics centers and financial centers.

Classical transportation process starts with a transportation contract which defines all the rules of the relationship. Either it is FT or LTT, the orders to be carried are received from depositor or the senders. Trips are generated from these orders with an advanced manual load planning screen.

Transportation might be in 6 different transportation processes as seen below. LO fully supports all these transportation processes.

      Transportation from single point to single point.

      Transportation from own DC to single point.

      Transportation via transit warehouse. (intra-city distribution)

      Picking up from multi points and distribution to multi points via 2 transit warehouses.

      Transportation with vehicles via an additional different transportation mode. (railway, sea, air)

      Ring transportation. Trucks may do a ring picking up loads and delivering them to delivery addresses all day. E.g. milk run operation; trucks pick up the empty bottles and delivers the full bottles or mostly faced in automotive transportation.

Ring Transportation

Transportation also may be within a project. In LO, project is group of orders to be shipped from single pointo to single point. (e.g. huge construction projects) The project schedule is also defined in LO and functions to build the right transportation planning.

Trip is the hotspot of transportation system. In a trip, there can be more than one order of more than one sender to be shipped to more than one address. One vehicle or more should also be assigned to the trip. (1 truck and 2 trailers, own or subcontractor). Also one or more drivers should be assigned to the trip. All the costs of these components are tracked in the trip. Trip has different status such as approved, loaded, departed, arrived, closed etc.

This module can track the process from receiving orders to delivery. LO can be a solution to all transportation processes such as project transportation, cargo transportation, LTT transportation, FT transportation, subcontracting transportation.

Different pack types and transportation modes can be defined. Allowance and payments can be tracked for vehicles and drivers. LO supports more than one physical and financial branch structure.

Business partners (depositor, sender, customer, subcontractor etc.) can enter their requests or track their shipment status in the web environment.

Related trip function also solves the issues for return trips. When trip 1 is the return of trip 2 (loaded or unloaded), then trips 1 and 2 are related to each other. Therefore, the costs and revenues of these trips can be distributed according to the different cost drivers. Or, trip 2 may not be a return trip but it may be a trip from first delivery point to another delivery address that was unplanned.

Contract Management

Contract Management module manages sales and purchasing contracts with customers and subcontractors. The details of a contract (price list etc.) with a customer or subcontractor can be reflected on the system. Price list can be per km, ton, pallet, volume, product category or all. According to these details, the sales price and purchase price of an order or a trip can be calculated easily. Also the reconciliation of purchasing from subcontractors and sales to depositors can be done by the users against subcontractor invoices or sales invoices. It also gives the opportunity of having cash flow reports from transportation orders, transportation projects. The prices are updated automatically after having the operation completed.

Contract copying and revision. Inflation, increase in fuel prices, revsing the contract with cutomers and subcontractors. These revisions can be done with stating the increase rate of relevant prices in LO.

The costs of trips (transport costs, trip expense, fuel etc) are considered to be contract lines and each contract line can be handled seperately and they take place in the total cost and revenue figures.

The distance details can be defined in a very flexible method.

With the pack type details, prices can be stated per distance and pack type. Pricing is based on calculation criteria such as (pack type;distance), (product group; weight; distance).

Price calculation has also a very flexible structure. For different weight intervals, different prices can be applied or if it is going to be calculated cumulatively or per unit.

Financials

Transactions such as invoicing, trip closing, driver allowance can be realized and reported in this module. The invoices and payments that are generated from orders and contracts are tracked in this module. Financially the system can track a hierarchy of financial branches.

Costing & Revenue

Costs and revenues can be distributed in any company structure according to any drivers. An example can be seen below for costing. It is important to set up the costing and revenue correctly in order to fetch the right distributed figures. Accordingly, the system can generate P&L reports and derivatives.

Logistics center and financial center relationship is also important fro costing and revenue distribution. The cost and revenue of the operations in the logistics centers effect the financial center figures accordingly.