From Four Hours to Five Minutes: Taking Route Planning Out of People’s Heads

A multi-site industrial manufacturer ran a $70M freight operation on tribal knowledge, with four full-time planners rebuilding routes by hand every day. Ayna Forge replaced the guesswork with a multi-constraint optimizer built on the systems already in place. Each planning run dropped from four hours to five minutes, and roughly $5M came out of annual freight cost.

The context: the biggest controllable cost most industrials barely manage

For most industrial manufacturers, freight is one of the largest controllable costs in the business, and one of the least actively managed. Route decisions get made under time pressure, by people, using judgment that never leaves their heads.

Transportation is the largest controllable expense in most logistics operations, at 65 to 68% of logistics budgets and roughly 10% of revenue. Companies that adopt route optimization routinely report 15 to 25% transportation savings. The money is on the table. What is usually missing is a way to make good routing decisions fast enough to matter, every day.

The gap: routing logic that lived in people’s heads

This manufacturer shipped to more than 200 delivery locations against a $70M annual freight bill. Route planning consumed four full-time employees daily. The logic that governed those routes lived entirely in the planners’ experience: which loads to consolidate, which carrier to use, how to sequence stops, how to weigh customer constraints. None of it was written down in a way a system could use.

The process was also brittle. Every time a new order arrived or a disruption hit, the plan had to be reworked from scratch, by hand, through several iterations. By the time a route was finalized, conditions had often already changed. The operation held together only because a few experienced people worked long hours to keep it that way, and that expertise was a single point of failure.

What we built: a multi-constraint optimizer on the systems already running

Ayna Forge deployed a multi-constraint route optimizer that evaluates every truck and delivery schedule simultaneously, weighing distance, transportation-mode costs, and customer constraints instead of optimizing one factor at a time. As orders arrive throughout the day, the system continuously re-plans routes, allowing operations to adapt in real time rather than waiting for the next manual planning cycle.

As with every Ayna Forge engagement, the optimizer was built on the company's existing systems rather than introducing a separate platform. It draws on existing order, shipment, and customer data, giving planners a single source of truth while eliminating duplicate data entry and the need to maintain information in multiple places.

The last mile: capturing tribal knowledge in natural language

The hard part was never the math. It was capturing decades of tribal knowledge and turning it into a system people would trust. Ayna Forge made that possible through natural language, allowing planners to describe the rules, exceptions, and operational nuances they had carried informally for years. The result was an optimizer that reflected how the business actually runs rather than an idealized version of the operation.

The system also modeled disruptions directly, recalculating costs instantly so teams could see the financial impact of every option as conditions changed instead of relying on estimates. The capability is now live in production and operating autonomously. The four planners who once rebuilt routes by hand have shifted to higher-value work, and routing no longer depends on a single individual's expertise or availability.

The impact: $5M out of freight, planning in minutes

Each optimization run dropped from four hours to five minutes, delivering better routes in a fraction of the time. By consolidating loads and reducing empty miles that were difficult to identify through manual planning, the system improved efficiency as well as speed. The result was approximately $5 million in annual freight savings on a $70 million transportation spend, while also freeing four skilled planners from daily firefighting to focus on higher-value work. All of this was achieved without replacing the systems already in place.

The final word

The freight savings are significant, but the more lasting value comes from what changed beneath them. A process that once depended on the expertise of four individual planners now runs in a system the company owns, one that can re-plan in minutes and adapt as orders or routes change. The manufacturer reduced freight costs by roughly $5 million while eliminating reliance on any one person to keep operations running smoothly.

Freight was simply the first area where the value was easy to quantify. The same approach applies wherever critical expertise is trapped in people's heads or buried in spreadsheets: identify the highest-value opportunity, build on the systems already in place, and stay involved until the capability is embedded and can operate independently.