In 2017, Opturion and TurboViz performed an analysis for a leading pathology company with the aim of optimising the company’s fleet operations and saving time and money when picking up and deliver ing samples. The company in question has over 90 NATA-accredited laboratories, performing more than six million tests a year for a range of clients, including doctors, specialists, patients, hospitals and businesses. These laboratories service over 92 private hospitals and eight public hospitals, making them the largest pathology provider to public hospitalsin Australia.
At the time of the analysis, the company’s fleet operations suffered from several defects. Pickup vehicles were running along regular allocated routes to and from laboratories, with minimal communication between drivers and laboratories. Consequently, over a third of pickup points had no samples available for pickup during any given run of a route. In contrast, roughly 10% of samples were marked ‘urgent’, requiring delivery within two hours, which often required the company to spend extra money on specialist couriers. Furthermore, inefficient vehicle allocation resulted in a disparity between fleet size and driver numbers that was causing needless expenditure on the part of the company.
The solutions proposed by TurboViz and Opturion involved implementing more data per sample, aided by TurboTrans’ proof-of-delivery capabilities. With the ability to incorporate origin and destination data for each sample, as well as pickup time windows, caps on transit time and potential intermediate drop-off points, they proposed a solution with a range of benefits, including: