SECTION 1 - INTRODUCTION.

CARGOMANAGER is a powerful personal computer based tool which will help you reduce the cost of movement, storage and transportation of goods. For example it will help you answer such questions as:

• Will this consignment fit in this container size (and how!)?

• How much more of a particular product can be loaded in this trailer / container? 

• How many containers are needed for this load? 

• Which container / trailer size is best suited / most cost-effective for this consignment - whether the consignment requires 1 or 900 containers?

• How would combinations of 2 different container sizes perform in packing a given consignment?

This release provides full 32 bit Windows functionality and naturally uses a standard Windows user interface. It has been designed for operation on Windows XP / Windows Vista / Windows 7/8/10 systems using ideally 1024*768 resolution or better. Note that the amount of information displayed on text screens will vary according to the resolution of the display being used - those presented in this manual are typically those seen by a user with a 1024*768 resolution display.

The software, as standard, supports screen and printer operations in English, French, German and Danish languages, this being selected from the opening screen. A number of additional 'User Tip' screens are also provided. These can be suppressed from display and can later be re-activated, again from the opening screen. An electronic and fully searchable manual is naturayy provided as are Help screens which provide information relevant to each specific screen.

CARGOMANAGER has been developed to tackle a a full range of problems associated with the packing of goods into any rectangular enclosure - for example a shipping container or trailer - in order to minimise wasted space and maximise the revenue you can achieve in packing a given container.

It enables the user to specify packing restrictions resulting from such considerations as the nature of the product, its weight, and the type of packaging used and to define packing priorities for each product, and cater for multi-drop loads. It provides both on-screen and printer reports illustrating how cases may be packed, and presents this information in an effective, three dimensional graphical form as well as a variety of two dimensional representations.

Section 6 of the manual discusses these settings in great detail.

CARGOMANAGER

This software has been developed by Gower Optimal Algorithms Limited, the company behind the highly successful PALLETMANAGER suite of programs. It has been developed to tackle a complementary range of packaging and distribution problems. The software was launched way back in 1989 (for DOS!), and whilst the current release bears no resemblance to the original (rather simple) product, factors which remains at the forefront of our development program are the quality of both the software itself and of the solutions obtained, and practicality of the software to meet the needs of users across a wide range of businesses.

As the user will rapidly appreciate the methods employed within the software are totally different to those used in our popular PALLETMANAGER pallet loading software and have been developed especially to tackle (primarily) mixed CARGO packing problems. As part of our development programme we would encourage you to write to us with any comments or suggestions you may have concerning the operation of the software and the facilities you would like to see incorporated in future releases.

The User Manual.

This user manual is intended to provide both introductory material for those making use of CARGOMANAGER for the first time and, in addition, provides sections devoted to a more detailed description of each facility. As users will expect a full set of on-screen Help is available. Access to the on-disk manual (which itself is browser based and includes a full search mechanism) is available from nearly every screen.

In the manual the problems illustrated are those of packing a container (or containers) with a cargo of various case types. In practice, the software can be used to tackle a wide range of cargo packing problems - shippers, mixed pallets etc. - the range is only likely to be restricted by the ingenuity of the users!

Section 2 of the manual describes the simple installation steps required to install the software onto your computer using the familiar Windows Installer based procedure.

As well as a brief 8 page Getting Started Guide, the descriptions in Sections 3 and 4 provide a guided tour of some of the basic features of the software. Section 3 tackles the problem of packing a single container with a cargo. Section 4 provides an insight into some of the more advanced features, including the facility of packing a container in a series of sections, and that of packing multiple containers.

Sections are also provided on each of the main CARGOMANAGER modules and these describe in some detail the facilities which each provides.

We are sure that you will find CARGOMANAGER to be both easy to use and of considerable benefit to your company. Once again, any suggestions on facilities which would be of use to you would be gratefully received.

• Input of cargo details via a user-friendly 'spreadsheet like' interface including an automatic two-way link to a large product database.

• Capability to input cargo from other sources including spreadsheets and databases.

• Provision to account for packing restrictions (for example orientation), and for specifying fragile or heavy items.

• Capability for user specification of cargo priorities.

• Analysis of cargo weight and volume prior to packing to allow adjustments to cargo list or container details.

• Inclusion of a multi-container feature to enable rapid calculation of the number of containers required for a consignment whether the consignment requires just 1 or 1000 containers.

• Facility to examine up to 50 possible container sizes in a single step - ranking these according to performance - whether considering loading just one container load or one requiring over 900 containers!

• Facility for saving cargo data on disk for subsequent re-run, and for input of user-created data files.

• Provision of a powerful and flexible set of packing methods which provide high volume packings whilst accounting for product packing constraints and priorities. The operation of these can be controlled by the user.

• Facility for packing cargo in a series of steps. This caters for multi-drop loads and for adding cargo to partly filled containers.

• Includes tools which will optimise the load mix when cargo weight is the loading restriction rather than space.

• Graphical displays in two and three dimensions, including views of the container as it is being packed, and when completely filled, and the capability to highlight any individual item on screen using the mouse and obtain its details and positioning information.

• Graphical display to screen of all the container loads forming a multi-container load, with the user able to select, print, level or add cargo to any or all as required.

• Powerful computer / user interaction providing realistic packing arrangements which are suitable for shop-floor loading. 

• Two and three-dimensional printer reports showing loading arrangements and case types used together with a picking list. Additional load co-ordinate report detailing the exact position of each item in a consignment.

• On-line access to the full hyperlinked manual.

• Add-on integrated Email facility.

Obtaining Better / Quicker Solutions.

CARGOMANAGER can be used for tackling a very wide range of problem types - from problems where a couple of dozen cases are to be fitted into a container, to those with several thousand cases to be fitted into one (or 1000!) containers. With this release, according to license, up to 15,000 item types can form a consignment and up to 20,000 items may be loaded into any one container.

As you might expect, although the packing algorithms (and thus the solutions), do automatically take into account the characteristics of the cargo as input by the user. Obtaining precisely the type of solution required (complexity, speed of solution, degree of cargo mixing etc.) by a particular user does require a little further user configuration.

This information is specified on a 'Packing Options' screen. The Screen itself, together with its associated Help menu, provides detailed guidance on the effect of the settings on the packing processes (They are also described in detail in Section 6 of this manual). Once set these values are typically left unchanged by users. Once you have learnt the basics of CARGOMANAGER, all users are encouraged to study Section 6 in some detail, and experiment with these features, to ensure that they obtain precisely the type of solutions they require.