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 in order to travel the 144,000 miles required to deliver presents.

IFS, 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 in order to travel the 144,000 miles required to deliver presents. 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. 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.

The route allows one minute per 10 million population, to unload at each country. Thus not all of Christmas Eve will 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 view the route, visit our blog or watch a behind-the-scenes video case study of Santa taking the decision to modernize Christmas. To follow the conversation on Twitter, search #IFS4Santa. 

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.