Three Fewer Trucks at Nettorama

11 Oct 2026 in Logistics on Routing

Say you run a supermarket chain. Fresh products come in every day, so you only know late what has to go to which store. When do you plan the trucks?

As late as possible. And then every route has to be right the first time.

That is how it goes at Nettorama. Every fresh run leaves from one fresh DC in Nijkerk, and they plan those runs with the TMS we build at DataFirst Logistics. This is what it brought:

3fewer trucks

Distribution cost−10%

Kilometres driven−8%

Driving time−12%

The whole bar is the situation before. The hatched part is what went.

Why is this hard?

Planning one trip is not hard. Say a truck has to visit 10 stores. In how many orders can it do that? \[10! = 3\,628\,800\]

A computer just tries them all. Now say 20 stores: \[20! \approx 2.4 \times 10^{18}\]

At a billion orders per second that takes 77 years. And that is still one truck, without any rules.

Now add the rules. There are eight, and they all apply at the same time:

Time windowsEvery store has a strict delivery window.

Mixed fleetVehicle types, each with its own capacity.

Load carriersPallets, roll cages and dollies.

EU rulesDriving hours, breaks and rest periods.

ReturnsReturn flows go into the same plan.

One truck per storeNever two trucks at the same store at once.

Fresh and groceryThe two runs do not overlap at a store.

Several trips a dayIn between, the truck reloads at the DC.

The annoying part is that they interlock. If a truck reaches the first store later, it falls outside the window at the next one. Or it stands there together with another truck, and that is not allowed:

One truck per store at a time

✕ Not like this

✓ Like this

Fresh runGrocery runSchematic. Time runs from left to right.

So how do you plan it?

Not by trying everything. You start with some plan and keep making small changes: move a store to another truck, swap two stores, turn a piece of a route around. If the plan gets cheaper, you keep the change. A change that breaks a rule is made so expensive that it loses.

Do that many thousands of times and you have routes that fit every rule, in seconds. The rules were entered once. After that you see per trip the hours, the kilometres and what you pay in truck toll.

And a truck does more than one trip a day, so the reloading is in the plan too:

One truck, several trips a day

Loading at the fresh DC→Trip 1: delivering to stores→Returns come back→Reloading at the DC→Trip 2

“DataFirst Logistics came out as the best among all evaluated parties, and the daily improvement in fuel, driving time and planning reliability speaks for itself.”

Lars, Head of Logistics at Nettorama

What changed in practice

A smaller trailer where it has to beCan a store only be served by a smaller trailer? Then the system plans a smaller trailer there automatically.

Replanning in secondsMore roll cages than the planned trips can carry? That used to mean delivering less. Now everything is redistributed over the most efficient routes.

The Driver App in the cabDrivers see their stops in the right order and sign off each stop with one tap. The planner sees live how every trip is going and can chat with the driver.

Road closures built inClosures such as the Merwede bridge (A27) go straight into the routes, so no truck ends up in front of a closed road.

How long did that take?

Four working sessions. No long implementation project.

1Analysis and baselineOrders, stores, route restrictions and KPIs as the starting point.

2Constraint designTime windows, vehicle classes, trailer capacity and EU rules modelled.

3Pilot livePilot routes driven live and compared against the baseline.

4Driver App liveChat between planner and driver, and returns shown per stop.

The longer version is on the DataFirst site: the article and the customer story.