IFS calculates Santa’s sleigh travels at 25 times the speed of sound to deliver 120 million presents worldwide

Every year Father Christmas sets off from his HQ in Lapland tasked with delivering presents to children the world over. As Santa is receiving more orders than ever before and client expectations are continually rising, IFS thought Santa could use an Elf Resource Planning system to help do things more efficiently.

Using Mobile Workforce Management software with dynamic scheduling, the Elf Resource Planning system calculated that Santa would need to travel at 19,210* mph from bedtime to sunrise in in order to travel the 144,000 miles required to deliver presents!

It turns out that Rudolph and team will need 3,660 tonnes of carrots to fuel them through the night. The reindeer, in turn, will pull over 180,000 tonnes of toys (and packaging) in the magic sleigh.

Santa Route #IFS4Santa

IFS Mobile Workforce Management with dynamic scheduling can be optimized by a number of criteria in order to increase profit, reduce cost and ensure service level agreement (SLA) compliance. Success stories with IFS Mobile Workforce Management include 15 percent reductions in travel and overtime costs, 40 percent improvement in technician productivity, and more than 20 percent improvements in SLA compliance and on-time delivery.

At the heart of IFS Mobile Workforce Management lies the IFS Dynamic Scheduling Engine (DSE), which 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.

Calculating Santa’s optimal route using our 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 culturally Christian and thus 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.

The route allows one minute per 10 million population, to unload at each country. Thus not all of Christmas Eve will be spent travelling: a lot of time is spent loading and unloading the magical sleigh. The actual distance travelled will be 144,000 miles assuming he needs to visit every country.

To see how IFS helped Santa this year, view the video or check out the route above. Follow the conversation on Twitter – search #IFS4Santa.

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