Aptean Routing & Scheduling Case Study: BSW Timber

The UK’s largest timber company, BSW Timber, manufactures and supplies a wide range of sawn products for an array of industries, such as pallet manufacturing, fencing, construction, landscaping and decking.

BSW’s complex operation includes a third-party fleet size of over 200 trucks, seven sawmills and multiple distribution centers. Because the company does its own sawmilling and manufacturing, each of its depots needs different truck sizes and capacities, adding another level of intricacy to its routing and scheduling operations.

The Challenge

Previously, routing and planning were decentralised, and each sawmill site had its own traffic planners. Due to manual routing capabilities and no visibility, delivery trucks would often pass one another on delivery routes. This caused a number of challenges for BSW:

• Manual route planning with no visibility across teams

• No centralised planning capabilities and inefficient routes

• Couldn’t direct routing for third-party logistics drivers

“The delivery planning operation was not joined up. We were looking at ways to be innovative in our approach and reduce the number of vehicles we were utilising per day, to help keep drivers within the group and keep them moving between sites,” BSW Group Logistics Manager stated.

The company needed a solution to enable more efficient, planned delivery operations.

The Solution

After a thorough research and vetting process, BSW chose to implement Aptean Routing & Scheduling software.

Aptean’s sophisticated route optimisation system allows BSW to plan routes using a variety of trucks and loading scenarios and provides the delivery efficiency the company needs throughout its peak seasons. The BSW team now completes the route plans in-house from one central location.

The Results

Aptean Routing & Scheduling software immediately helped BSW streamline and optimise inefficient processes, improve route planning capabilities and reduce time-intensive manual administration.

The BSW team noted that Aptean’s route optimisation system reduced planning time straight out of the box. The Group Logistics Manager said, “We saw the solution impacting almost all our results by a meaningful degree such that we are able to see real cost and time savings as a result. We have reduced our time planning deliveries significantly which allows the team to focus more time with the actual deliveries and more time allocated to ensuring customer delivery satisfaction.”

With Aptean Routing & Scheduling, BSW Timber was able to:

• Significantly improve route planning time

• Reduce administrative time and workload

• Better utilise its resources

• Gain complete visibility across the operation

Since the implementation of Aptean Routing & Scheduling software, BSW has also reduced the numbers of resources engaged in the planning operation.

As the Group Logistics Manager commented, “It’s about aligning the right people’s skills and expertise to the right tasks. It’s a way to improve productivity and optimise our resources to the best potential. While it’s still early days, we continue to see improvements and an increasing number of benefits since implementing this new system into our operation.”

For BSW, the software’s most significant selling point was the extensive functionality. Since BSW relies on a third-party fleet to deliver its product, the company found it difficult to find a system that would allow it to utilise third-party haulage but still manage the route planning and scheduling themselves.

Aptean delivered on that in spades.

“We don’t run any of our own vehicles,” The Group Logistics Co-Ordinator at BSW said. “We’re just planning the loads for third-party haulage contractors. All the [other] systems we explored were based on a company running their own vehicles—but what Aptean has allowed us to do is plan successive loads. If we’ve got a load coming from Fort William to Carlisle to our own site, we plan for that vehicle to be loaded straight back out and down the road, possibly delivering directly to customers. It was those benefits that we saw immediately. We were able to seamlessly pull all our operations together.”

Ready To Meet and Beat Your Delivery Operation Challenges?

With flexible and sophisticated features to meet the specific needs of your delivery or logistics business, Aptean’s cloud-based route optimisation platform can cut your transport costs by 30%, remove manual planning processes, and provide complete visibility and control into logistics operations.

Plus, our strategic route planning functionality empowers you to assess the impact of “what-if” scenarios—such as moving a distribution centre or taking on a new customer—before making the changes. This allows you to further streamline efficiency, boost data-driven decision making and enable a cycle of continuous improvement.

And best of all, Aptean Routing & Scheduling is just one solution in our fully integrated suite of logistics systems. So whether you’re in the market for electronic proof of delivery software, a full transport management system, real-time route management tools or a specialised home delivery solution, you can cover all your needs with one proven vendor.

Schedule a personalised demo today to see how Aptean Routing & Scheduling can optimise your transport operations.