operations research Archives - Page 2 of 8

How to Plan a Delivery Route (the Way a Solver Does It)

Ask ten small fleets how to plan a delivery route and nine will describe some version of the same ritual: a list of addresses, a map, and somebody’s gut feeling about which order “makes sense.” I’ve spent years building routing models for real operations, and the gap between a gut-feel route and an optimized one is rarely small — it’s usually measured in whole driver-hours per day. The good news: planning delivery routes properly is a repeatable process, and most of it isn’t even math. It’s preparation.

What Is VRP? The Vehicle Routing Problem, Explained

So what is VRP, exactly? It stands for the vehicle routing problem, and it’s the three-letter answer to a question every delivery operation asks itself before sunrise: which vehicle should visit which stops, and in what order? I’ve spent a good chunk of my career as an operations research analyst building routing models for real fleets, and I still think VRP is the most practical piece of math most people have never heard of. If a truck brought you anything this week, a VRP solver (or a dispatcher sweating over a map) decided how it got there.

Illustration of a hand selecting a destination on a car's GPS navigation screen, representing route planning and vehicle routing optimization

12-Hour Shift Schedule Template (Free & Editable)

If you have ever searched for a 12 hour shift schedule template, you already know the problem: the internet is full of pretty grids that show you what a rotation looks like, but almost none of them actually build a working schedule for your team, with your people, your coverage minimums, and your time-off requests. A static template is a picture of a schedule. What you usually need is the schedule itself. This post is the “start here” overview: what a 12-hour shift schedule is, the trade-off you are really signing up for, the named patterns worth knowing, and how to skip the download-and-fight-with-a-spreadsheet step entirely.

12-hour shift schedule basic 2-team coverage

What Is a Rotating Shift Schedule? (Free Builder)

A rotating shift schedule is one where employees cycle through different shifts over time — a week of mornings, then a stretch of evenings, then a run of nights — instead of being locked to the same block every day. If your operation has to be staffed around the clock but you don’t want the same handful of people permanently stuck on nights, some form of rotation is usually how you spread that burden. This post is the plain-English version: what the term means, the two directions a rotation can turn, how fast it should turn, and where the well-known named patterns fit in.

I’ve built scheduling models for manufacturing plants and 24/7 operations for a couple of decades, and rotation is one of those topics where the folklore and the research don’t always line up. So I’ll keep the claims modest and point you at the source material where it matters.

Rotating shift schedule forward rotation example

What Is a Pitman Schedule? (Free Schedule Builder)

If you work in law enforcement, fire, EMS, or a 24/7 control room, you’ve probably heard your rotation called a Pitman schedule — even if nobody could tell you exactly why it’s called that. A pitman schedule is a 12-hour, two-week rotating shift pattern built to keep an operation staffed around the clock while giving each person a predictable rhythm: never more than three shifts in a row, and every other weekend off. Mechanically, it overlaps heavily with what a lot of people call the 2-2-3 schedule (a sibling post on this site walks through those mechanics in more general terms) — but the Pitman name carries its own history and shows up overwhelmingly in public-safety and industrial shift work specifically. Below I’ll cover where the name is said to come from, how the rotation lays out day by day, why it fits work that can never go dark, and how to build one for your own team for free.