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it is bought at the same time as the computer hardware from Scicon. Suitable hardware such, as the HewlettPackard 3000 minicomputer, costs £25£30,000.
Only two Vanplan systems have been sold so far; Cadbury-Schweppes uses one and Cratifield Institute of Technology has the other.
Scicon Limited, 49 Berners Street, London W IP 4AQ. Tel: 01-580 5599.
Distribution Planning Systems
This company has a rather different scheduling system called Carp — computer aided route planning.
With this the rounds are manually planned in the time-honoured way. The planner can then key the salient points of the rounds into the Carp computer which will give an assessment of them in terms of mileage, time and utilisation of the vehicle's capacity expressed as a percentage.
More significantly, it can also give a guide to the cost of operating a round, based on known standing and running costs.
The national third-party distribution company Lowfield Distribution is a major user of Carp, having put the system into its Newport depot back in 1983. Carp is now being used in seven of the company's depots and it will be installed in the other six by the end of the year.
Lowfield felt that the usual type of computer scheduling was not right for a third-party distribution specialist, mainly because the customer base is changing so frequently. It also wanted to let its planners retain their role, helped by a computer doing the calculations involved in assessing and comparing rounds.
"The system leaves the planners more time for thinking and planning," said a Lowfield spokesman. The company finds it particularly useful, for example, in comparing the costs of planning a load as a second trip or integrating it into the rounds.
Lowfield also uses Carp to examine the fleet mix in terms of vehicle sizes.
Being much simpler, Carp has the advantage of being considerably cheaper than most other systems. A single depot installation, including the hardware, would cost around £5,000. Lowfield is • running Carp on Apricot microcomputers.
Distribution Planning Systems, 6 Brier Mill Road, Halesowen, West Midlands B63 3HA. Tel: 021-550 3027.