Glanbia plc has saved 16% in delivery costs thanks to an advanced computerised routing and scheduling solution from Paragon Software Systems. The company says the savings have paid back its investment in a matter of months.
Glanbia is one of Ireland’s largest food companies and is the supplier of Yoplait, Avonmore and Kilmeaden dairy produce. The company went live with the delivery routing software in September 2009, allowing the company to remove three trucks from its fleet. Since then a further two vehicles have been retired from service through recalibrating the routes and schedules.
The system includes Paragon Route Execution software for integrated satellite vehicle tracking, allowing Glanbia’s transport management team to compare actual fleet activity against the delivery plan. Using this real-world information, Glanbia has cut the number of delivery routes from 28 to 23, enabling the substantial savings.
“We are very pleased with the performance of the Paragon delivery routing software. Not only has it helped us reduce our delivery costs by 16%, we have improved the accuracy of our plans. This way we are saving around 3.5% a year for each vehicle and driver that we take out of the fleet operation, says Dave Colgan, Transport Manager. “Also, with vehicle tracking communicating with the system through Route Execution, we can easily recalibrate the system to use actual times spent on making each delivery. Our overall delivery performance and efficiency has increased significantly with this technology.”
Glanbia uses the delivery routing software to model, review and improve fixed routes for making about 2,000 deliveries a week to a wide range of customers. These include most supermarkets and convenience stores operating throughout Ireland’s 26 counties.
Glanbia is developing its use of the system to enable automatic text message alerts of potential late deliveries to the transport management and customer service team. This is triggered by real-time information transmitted by the vehicle tracking equipment. This will allow the customer services team to telephone customers should they need to reschedule a delivery.
“Automatic alerts allow us to be proactive. It means we can keep our customers up to date of any change to the delivery schedule. It will improve our customer relations as they will no longer need to call in to find out what is happening with their deliveries,” says Dave Colgan.
Glanbia will also use Paragon’s delivery routing software to create journey plans for company sales representatives. This will further improve customer service and optimise use of the sales team’s time and availability. “This is an interesting development for us. Paragon can be adapted to perform as our customer service management tool. We can easily set up the system to give accurate travelling times as well as the time needed with each customer. It gives a clear view of weekly planned activity for each member of the team. This shows the utility of the system as a company-wide transport management tool,” concludes Dave Colgan.
