Walmart's route optimizer cut 30 million truck miles and 94 million pounds of CO2.

Walmart runs one of the largest private truck fleets in the world, so even a tiny inefficiency in how a truck is routed or packed scales into millions of miles and enormous emissions. The default is for planners to map routes by hand and load trailers by rule of thumb.

Walmart Global Tech built a route optimization system that solves the multi-stop journey and the trailer load plan together, factoring in time, location, store delivery windows, weather and traffic, and keeping temperature-controlled items within range.

The result was dramatic and measurable: 30 million unnecessary miles eliminated, 94 million pounds of CO2 avoided, and 110,000 inefficient paths bypassed. The gain comes from optimising the whole journey, including backhauls so trailers are never empty, rather than shaving each leg in isolation.

The technology won Walmart the 2023 Franz Edelman Award for operations research. The company then turned the same engine into a commercial SaaS product, Route Optimization, so other retailers could adopt it rather than build their own.

Optimise routes and trailer loading together.

Coupling route and load decisions captures gains each ignores in isolation.

Backhaul planning keeps trailers from returning empty, cutting cost and CO2.

A 1% route improvement is enormous when repeated across a huge fleet.

Productising the engine spreads a proven asset across other businesses.

When two decisions are coupled — where a truck goes and how it's loaded — solve them together, then productise the engine that did it.

Walmart's route optimization won the 2023 Franz Edelman Award and was then launched as a commercial SaaS product through Walmart Commerce Technologies. The same technology that cut the company's own miles and emissions became a revenue stream, turning an internal operations-research win into an external offering that other businesses could buy rather than rebuild.