ORTEC announced its Zone Engineering Manager (ZEM), a new solution designed to help organizations across distribution and logistics improve efficiency and service quality through optimized territory design, visit day scheduling, and integrated routing capabilities.
ZEM delivers a strategic layer to delivery operations, enabling businesses to proactively engineer delivery zones and schedules that align with both operational realities and customer demands.
“Delivery operations require both tactical foresight and day-to-day efficiency,” says Bryan Kuiper, product manager at ORTEC. “With the Zone Engineering Manager, we’re giving our customers the tools to strategically design delivery territories and schedules that reduce costs while elevating service quality.”
Key takeaways:
· ZEM creates efficient, clustered groups of customers and balancing workloads across resources, such as drivers. Its map-based clustering and polygon selection features allow planners to quickly adjust territories and keep drivers working in familiar areas. This ensures customer-driver relationships are maintained from one planning period to the next, improving both efficiency and service continuity.
· The solution also generates visit-day proposals driven by key performance indicators, including working time, distance, number of visits, and load volume (weight), helping companies evaluate trade-offs and select the best-fit schedules. ZEM is designed to handle a wide variance in customer contracts, delivery frequencies, and visit schemes, providing the flexibility needed to meet diverse operational requirements. By seamlessly integrating with daily routing systems, strategic territory designs flow directly into live execution.
· Scenario planning capabilities further strengthen decision-making, allowing organizations to run “what-if” simulations when expanding into new markets, merging customer networks, or adjusting visit frequencies. The testing of these scenarios in advance empowers planners to better understand the impact of changes and implement the most cost-effective and service-friendly path forward.
· ZEM helps companies improve efficiency by minimizing travel time and balancing workloads across drivers. It enhances service quality by establishing optimized delivery schedules that reflect demand patterns, while reducing costs through smarter territory design and better fleet utilization. ZEM also provides agility by allowing planners to test and compare multiple scenarios, giving organizations the foresight to anticipate and prepare for change.
· ZEM is designed for flexible deployment and seamless integration with existing logistics planning and execution systems. Its intuitive interface ensures planners can be trained quickly, enabling faster adoption and immediate impact on operations.
· ZEM’s AI Chatbot assists the planner in creating a tactical plan.
