A major uniform and linen distributor had grown its network to more than 140 distribution centers throughout the US and Canada, but they still struggled to plan delivery and sales territories in an efficient way. Because they were stuck using cumbersome, on-premise legacy solutions, it took the company’s team of analysts and routers anywhere between 6 and 10 weeks to do reroutes for a single location.
The Challenge
Obviously, this limited the number of reroutes they could do in a year, which in turn limited how agile and efficient they could be in managing their sales/delivery territories. It was difficult to ensure that their drivers/sellers were getting equal workloads and revenue opportunities, and making sure their customers were being served efficiently across their entire network was a serious challenge. The company knew that if they could find a smarter way to plan territories, they could find new efficiencies and power significant cost savings across their network.
The Solution
By partnering with DispatchTrack, this major uniform and linen distributor found a solution provider who was willing to go the extra mile. We were able to offer an AI-powered SaaS solution that could calculate territories in minutes, rather than hours or days. Our platform enabled the company’s routers to:
- Input the parameters for their chosen distribution center
- Immediately visualize their baseline plan, including the hours and revenue for each driver/seller
- Run instantaneous optimizations on those baseline plans to improve balance and efficiency within each territory
- Quickly and easily adjust system-generated territories as needed
- Automatically generate daily routes during territory planning
- Run reports to highlight the changes between existing and proposed plans
The Results
All of these enhancements to the territory planning process added up to significant time and cost savings. While the company is still finishing up the complete solution rollout, their analysts and routers are already using DispatchTrack every day to do reroutes at their distribution centers. The results have been striking:
- Reduction in time required to reroute a distribution center from 6-10 weeks to just 2 days
- Potential reduction in miles driven of more than 15%
- Significant time saved by automatically generating daily routes based on territories.
Whereas their old solution required them to build daily routes by hand based on their territories, DispatchTrack enabled them to generate routes automatically during territory planning. As the full rollout of the solution continues over the rest of the year, the company expects to get even more impressive results, laying the groundwork for significant cost savings across their entire network.
