How a 50-Truck Fleet Cut Fuel Costs by 23%
A European logistics operator replaced their route planning software with kint. These are the numbers.
Prof. Dr. Ing. Pascal Laube
Key Takeaways
- 23% reduction in fuel spend in the first quarter
- Route planning time dropped from 4 hours to 8 minutes per day
- Driver overtime fell 31% because routes matched actual delivery windows
- No retraining required. The operations team used plain-language problem descriptions.
A European logistics company with 50 trucks and 2,800 daily delivery points was losing money on every route. Two experienced planners spent 4 hours each morning building routes in Excel and a legacy TMS. The routes worked. They were not optimal.
4h
daily planning time
before kint
50
trucks in fleet
2,800
delivery points per day
The Problem They Brought to Us
Every morning, the planning team juggled time windows, vehicle capacities, EU driver regulations, and customer priorities. A single change to one route cascaded through the entire plan. Late deliveries triggered penalty clauses. Fuel costs climbed 12% year-over-year despite stable volume.
They had evaluated three route optimization tools. All required months of integration and a dedicated IT project. The operations team did not have months.
We needed something that understood our constraints without us having to code them. We described the problem in plain text and kint handled the math.
Head of Operations
What Changed
Integration took three weeks. The operations team described their constraints in natural language. kint extracted the mathematical model, connected to their existing data sources, and ran the first optimization. The result: 38 routes instead of 47, all time windows met, all driver regulations respected.
-23%
fuel costs
vs. previous quarter
-31%
driver overtime
8 min
daily planning time
was 4 hours
The Numbers After 90 Days
Fuel costs dropped 23% in the first quarter. Driver overtime fell 31% because routes finally matched real delivery windows instead of optimistic estimates. The two planners now spend 8 minutes reviewing kint's output instead of 4 hours building plans manually.
The operations director called it the highest-ROI technology investment in the company's history. The payback period was 6 weeks.
