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Aptean Routing & Scheduling Success Story: Warburtons

Aptean Routing & Scheduling Success Story: Warburtons

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Aptean Routing & Scheduling Success Story: Warburtons

20 May 2021

Transcript:

Warburton's is the largest branded bakery supplier in the UK. We do around about sixteen thousand deliveries each day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-two days a year. And we've got a fleet of around eight hundred vehicles operating from twenty four distribution sites. They may be cross-dock depots or some of our bakeries as well. The emphasis is on quality and service to customers and we invest probably a bit more.

The way things are changing is, is customers are becoming more demanding. So probably, I would say, but I started off in logistics maybe 20 years ago, people were just happy to receive the delivery on the day. Now, they want to know what time it's gonna come, what time you actually got there, how much you're gonna deliver before you got there. And did you deliver it when you actually arrived? So there's a whole range of extra data that probably is continuing to grow over time, and we need to respond to that to meet our customers' requirements, really.

It's really our adherence to our delivery plan, really is the critical measure and actually we're ascertaining the fact that we've actually got an effective plan to start off with. We have immediate visibility of that when we put our daily schedules into Paragon Fleet Control. As the day progresses, you know, the real critical "if", if the plan's effective, and you know, we need to follow that plan to make sure that we actually deliver on that, and we measure that, you know, as I say, minute by minute, you know, and all the operators can log into Paragon at any time to check. I think as well, the other thing about using the real-time data to create the plan in the first place, is that it gives a certain higher level of credibility when you present that plan to the operation and say, "I want you to go and do that."

The challenge back is always "Well, it takes this long to do this and that." Well, actually, no, it doesn't because this is what you've done for the last three weeks, five weeks, six months. So you actually got the event and then they builds a level of real buy-in. They can see why the plan is the way that it is. And actually then they can feel confident that they could go away and execute that and sell that to their room. The drivers, effectively, who were actually out there on the road doing it.

The other element to it is the Paragon Fleet Controller, where we've got our tracking partners, we send minute by-minute, real-time feeds into the system, which we then measure against our delivery schedule on the day. We've got a number of measures that we look at. So we look at our planned effectiveness. So, is our plan is going to achieve what we wanted to do before the vehicle is set off? Are we sticking to the plan throughout the day? And then did we achieve all of our customer service requirements? And with the real-time data combined with a schedule that we've got in Paragon, we can measure all those elements in real-time at any point during the day. So start-middle-end and then we collect all that into a series of KPIs, which we then sort of publish out to the network to the depots, can benchmark each other on and where they're at, really.

So we have some strategic systems which we use offline on laptops, which my planning team used to remodel the network. And also, you know, look at things, like strategic elements, like our depot locations and things like that. Are they in the right place? Do we need more depots and all that kind of long-term strategic thinking. But also we use that to remodel on a fairly regular basis to make sure as efficient as possible and we're also fulfilling our customer service objectives.


If your business is eager to utilize our purpose-built transportation and routing software like Warburton's, reach out to our team of Routing experts today.


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