Aptean Routing & Scheduling Case Study: Greggs

Greggs is the UK’s leading bakery food-on-the-go retailer with over 1,800 shops nationwide, serving over six million customers a week. Greggs has undertaken an ambitious £100 million, five-year investment to reshape its supply chain. This is part of a strategic plan designed to transform it from a decentralized traditional bakery business into a centrally-run, food-on-the-go brand that can meet the choice and availability customers’ demand. The initiative included the creation of a nationwide network of centers of excellence in manufacturing and distribution, increasing capacity to support shop expansion substantially beyond 2,000 outlets.

The Challenge

With growing diversity in its operations, the distribution planning process had become progressively more complex – creating several operational challenges for Greggs:

• Operating a fleet of 250 temperature-controlled vehicles that provide 3,500 store deliveries daily

• Mounting pressure on supply chain to meet growing customer expectations

• Complex distribution planning systems impacting operational efficiencies

The Solution

With the food-on-the-go sector rapidly expanding in the UK, Greggs faced growing pressure on their supply chains to meet changing customer expectations, so needed to adopt more advanced planning tools into their operation to achieve the highest levels of efficiency, utilization and service performance. They also needed a solution that would help:

• Simplify the planning process

• Target efficiency savings

• Maintain high service standards and customer satisfaction

• Factor in operational changes to ensure optimum performance

The Result

Implementing Aptean Routing & Scheduling has enabled Greggs to quickly identify improvement opportunities and create highly efficient multi-drop route plans that better serve their retail network.

• Optimized the planning process

• Improved vehicle utilization by over 30%

• Removed almost 900 miles a week from local plans

• Fuel savings of more than 2%

• Reduced CO2 emissions by around 35 tons per year

Visit our Aptean Insights page for more routing solution case studies. Be sure to read how George's Inc. streamlined their transport planning process, eliminating hours of manual planning time and saved over $30k a year on fuel costs.