If you happen to be Australian then you will almost certainly have eaten one of Goodman Fielder’s grocery products at one time or another. The Sydney-based food giant’s catalogue encompasses everything from frozen pizzas and cake mix to vinegar and cooking oil: and one of its biggest volume sellers is bread.

Distributing loaves bearing names such as Wonder White and Helga’s to 14,000 outlets daily across a country the size of Australia from a nationwide network of depots quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively is a major challenge, which is why the company decided to invest in a planning, mapping, routeing, scheduling and optimisation software package sourced from UK specialist MapMechanics. It has resulted in major progress being made in Goodman Fielder’s efforts to cut expenditure, says the company’s national supply chain business analyst, Paul March.

‘We’ve been able to optimise the number of vehicles used, we’ve reduced mileage and fuel costs and we’ve provided more sustainable earnings for the independent contractors who do our final deliveries and merchandising, reinforcing their commitment to our business,’ he states. 

The contractors are all small, local firms. ‘A while back we realised that we had to make delivery routes more sustainable for them, ensuring that they all had an optimal mix of larger and smaller customers and were using the right types of vehicle,’ says Mr March.

‘Unfortunately we simply didn’t have the time or the necessary information to make informed judgements,’ he continues. ‘We needed the right tools to help us make strong commercial decisions.’

The tools supplied by MapMechanics included GeoConcept, a mapping and geographical information system, and NAVTEQ street-level digital mapping. They helped Goodman Fielder look at customers differentiated by size and type and map out territories.

It was also able to map traffic flows. Using features such as GeoConcept’s “find nearest” and travel-time calculations it was able to re-balance territories and even out the distribution load between contractors.

The delivery lists were then passed to TruckStops, a routeing and scheduling package, to verify and produce viable delivery rounds with the best possible mix of customers. ‘We were able to set up TruckStops to weigh all the main factors, including merchandising times, and come up with an overall best solution,’ Mr March says.

One key benefit is that when the contractor has to use relief drivers to cover for absence due to sickness or holidays, they can be provided with ready-made route plans that are known to be viable. 

MapMechanics founder and sales director Mary Short contends that fleets that invest in routeing and scheduling systems can benefit from fuel savings of anywhere from 10% to as high as 30%. There are what she refers to as “soft” savings to be enjoyed too, she adds. 

‘You make fewer mistakes, and the cost of correcting mistakes can of course be expensive for a business,’ she observes. ‘Putting a schedule together takes fewer man hours than doing it all manually and you may discover that you can extend the cut-off time for accepting orders. 

‘It helps you plan strategically as well, allowing you for example to work out whether you would benefit from setting up an additional depot.’

Another food company on the other side of the world from Australia is using transport planning software from another UK supplier to boost efficiency and reduce costs.

Dairy products group Glanbia Consumer Foods Ireland has used a package from Paragon Software Systems to help it cut 106,000km annually from its delivery routes across the Republic of Ireland, reduce its routes by 10%, improve vehicle utilisation by 15% and reduce its yearly CO2 emissions by over 100 tonnes thanks to the fuel savings made. Service levels have improved at the same time, says Glanbia. 

The dairy operation runs six days a week between 6am and 10pm from Glanbia’s Ballitore, County Kildare, distribution centre supplying major retailers plus 145 local agents who are subcontracted to deliver products from the company’s Coldbox locations.  

It faces some tough time constraints, with retailers demanding deliveries within a two-hour 6am to 8am time slot. With the Coldbox depots the delivery window is considerably wider, at from 4pm to 6am the next day. 

Having gathered all the information needed on retailers, agents, depots and so on in order to model the current routes and costs, Glanbia was able to experiment with a variety of different scenarios with an eye to improving efficiencies. It discovered that the best approach was to standardise Coldbox time windows at a regional level and combine Coldbox deliveries with time-constrained direct store deliveries. 

‘Paragon has provided us with a very powerful strategic tool,’ says national logistics manager, Denis Conway. ‘It allows us to test all the potential delivery scenarios off-line without affecting our real-world routes and by using the routes it designs we can easily recognise where improvements can be made and implement them. 

‘With the constant increase in fuel costs and the drive to reduce our transport carbon footprint, we have been able to make significant reductions in usage and emissions while improving the efficiency of our delivery operation.’

Paragon takes factors other than time windows into consideration, stresses UK managing director, Will Salter.

‘If you are delivering in and around London, for instance, we can also take into account everything from locations that are awkward to access and may take the driver more time to get into and get unloaded, to the need to minimise the number of congestion charge payments the operator has to make,’ he says. ‘Our software can also help you determine whether you are using the right size and number of vehicles for the job concerned.’

Even the best-planned delivery schedules can of course fall apart if a major accident on a main highway results in its closure for several hours leading to traffic jams on all the roads in the surrounding area. If that occurs then fleet managers need to know what it is happening immediately so that they can warn customers that drivers are held up or having to depart from their usual routes, and deliveries may be late as a consequence. 

With this sort of scenario in mind, UK fleet optimisation, modelling and routeing software specialist Route Monkey has joined forces with telematics specialist CMS SupaTrak to develop EcoPlan.  

Integrating planned routes with actual journeys taken, it allows data to be transmitted to in-cab telematics units including CMS SupaTrak’s recently launched SDA 2. Drivers can see and follow the planned routes but are at the same time able to record any delays so that the information is immediately available to traffic managers back at home base. CMS SupaTrak can give operators the ability to re-schedule deliveries in real-time in response to events occurring while their vans are already out on the highway and despatch the revised schedules to drivers, says sales and marketing director, Alex Harper. ‘The new schedule can be sent to a PDA or a fixed in-cab device,’ he says. 

If reports generated by the tracking package regularly show that the delivery times allowed by the routeing and schedule software are at odds with reality then times can be amended accordingly. Paragon has forged links with a number of tracking companies including Microlise, Isotrak and Navman.

‘They too allow fleets to see how delivery runs are progressing compared with the schedule and do a quick re-plan if needs be,’ says Mr Salter. 

Paragon has over 2,300 routeing and scheduling systems installed in more than 750 client sites in 45 countries and in a variety of different languages. Customers range from firms running 10 vehicles from a single warehouse to companies with hundreds of vehicles operating from several depots. 

Aside from Glanbia, users include Swedish food retailer ICA, which has linked what Paragon has to offer with its R-Com (Blue Tree Systems) vehicle tracking and temperature monitoring system. Gases and engineering group Linde now employs Paragon’s package throughout much of the world, while last year saw Agrokor Group, Croatia’s largest food and retail organisation, extend its use into the company’s meat and cooking oil business.  

The company employs it to help organise deliveries of over 1,500 orders daily to outlets all over the country. ‘Instead of the old-fashioned and restrictive black-on-green computer interface that we’d been using for years, we now see routes detailed accurately on digital maps,’ says Marko Pevec, enterprise resource planning consultant with Agrokor’s IT division. 

‘It also provides full visibility of loads so that we know which orders make up each vehicle load, all of which can be viewed on screen.’ 

Routeing and scheduling systems are applicable to almost every country on the planet, assuming that decent maps are available. Limitations may be imposed on the uses to which such maps are put however, says Mr Salter. 

‘We have street-level maps of every province in China – we’ve now got a Chinese version of our package – but the authorities will not allow us to take them out of the country and all the development work done on them has had to be done over there,’ he says.  

‘We’re not even permitted to bring in our own laptop to work on them,’ he adds. ‘Instead we have to use a local laptop that has to remain in the country.’ The South Koreans take a similar attitude, he says. 

Routeing and scheduling software does not come cheap. As a consequence any business that uses a vehicle tracking system should be aware that it can use the data the system already holds to make major improvements to its delivery arrangements without spending money on an expensive software package, contends Martin Davies, joint managing director of tracking provider RAM. 

‘The most important aspect of tracking is its ability to report: its ability to tell you how long it took for a van to get to a particular destination and how long it spent there,’ he says. ‘You can compare that with how long you thought the driver would take then find out why there is a difference between what you thought would happen and what really happened. 

‘One thing we can do is display all the routes your vans are taking on a map in different colours,’ he continues. ‘That way, you can soon see if you’ve got three vans travelling down the same route at the same time and determine whether that’s a sensible use of resources. 

‘You can also see if a driver is deviating off his route to make a special delivery to premises that another driver is already passing on his regular run,’ he adds. It would probably be more sensible and cost-effective to let the latter driver handle the delivery. 

RAM has an operation in Canada as well as the UK. Davies says that Canadian fleets seem particularly willing to mine the data their tracking systems hold in order to hunt down cost savings.  

‘Perhaps the reason is that Canada suffered a severe economic downturn some years ago which made operators realise how vital it is to get a proper grip on costs,’ he observes.

Still mired in recession, some fleets in other countries may yet have that lesson to learn.