[December 29, 2014]

IFS: Magic sleigh travels at 25 times the speed of sound to deliver 120 million presents worldwide

IFS (http://www.ifsworld.com/), the global enterprise applications company, has crunched the numbers on the toughest logistics challenge in the world.

Every year Father Christmas sets off from his HQ in Lapland tasked with delivering presents to children the world over. Using IFS Mobile Workforce Management with dynamic scheduling, it's calculated that Santa would need to travel at 19,210* mph from bedtime to sunrise in order to travel the 144,000 miles required to deliver presents.

Rudolph and team will need 3,660 tons of carrots to fuel them through the night. The reindeer, in turn, will pull over 180,000 tons of toys (and packaging) in the magic sleigh. Assuming a standard shot of brandy is served up at the households Santa visits he will consume over 4.7 million pints of brandy over the course of the night putting him roughly 60 million times over the legal limit.

"Businesses of all sizes face logistical challenges; granted, not every business has a magical CEO capable of circumnavigating globe overnight squeezing down chimneys of all shapes and sizes to hand-deliver individually gift-wrapped presents, but then not every company has a CEO who only works nine hours of the year and drinks more than enough brandy to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool," said a spokesperson at IFS.

Calculating Santa's optimal route using the IFS scheduling engine required a number of assumptions to be made in order to arrive at the total of 120 million presents to be delivered:

• About one third of the world's population are believed to celebrate Christmas
• Kids under three have no idea who Santa is and over eight they no longer believe in him. Fact.
• Assuming U.S. demographics hold true, about 10 percent of the population is this age range: so that's 200 million potential believers worldwide
• Assuming 10 percent of kids work out the "Santa" situation sooner, 10 percent have parents that don't uphold the Santa myth for ideological reasons, 10 percent who don't uphold gift-giving for financial reasons and 10 percent who have different beliefs on Christmas - that leaves an estimated number of potential believers at 120 million - assuming two kids per family, that's 60 million chimneys to squeeze down.

IFS Dynamic Scheduling Engine (DSE) is deployed around the world by more than 6,000 users to optimize the scheduling of all kinds of field resources from technicians to assets alike. It uses powerful algorithms to automate and optimize scheduling decisions based on configurable and reconfigurable business constraints, transforming a service operation into a more efficient profit center, all while delighting customers.

*All findings in this report are subject to a variety of logistical assumptions - some of which are naughty, some of which are nice.

About IFS

IFS (http://www.ifsworld.com/en/)™ is a globally recognized leader in developing and delivering business software for enterprise resource planning (ERP), enterprise asset management (EAM) and enterprise service management (ESM). IFS brings customers in targeted sectors closer to their business, helps them be more agile and enables them to profit from change. IFS is a public company (XSTO: IFS) that was founded in 1983 and currently has over 2,600 employees. IFS supports more than 2,200 customers worldwide from local offices and through partners in more than 60 countries. For more information, visit: www.ifsworld.com.

Follow us on Twitter: @ifsworld (http://twitter.com/ifsworld)

Visit the IFS Blogs on technology, innovation and creativity: http://blogs.ifsworld.com

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]