Solving logistical challenges within food and beverage industries
Serving demanding customers in hospitality with time-sensitive needs is an established requirement for food and beverage distributors, is a daily reality.
If distributors don’t get the right products to customers at the right time, in the requested location and in good condition, their bottom line will suffer.
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Overcome Food & Beverage Distribution Challenges
Customer Service
Improve customer service with customer-enabled order tracking and automated delivery notifications. Throughout the order lifecycle, customers receive updates via email or SMS. These messages provide a link to a branded, online customer portal where clients may check the status of their orders and follow their driver's location on a map in real-time.
Effectiveness of Route Planning
Order fulfilment is difficult for operational managers at food and beverage organisations without effective fleet route management software. It is important to ensure perishable goods are moved quickly and efficiently to ensure that food and beverage products do not spoil in transit. Your logistics and fleet operations should place a high priority on delivery route optimisation, with the potential to automate route planning all the way to last-mile delivery.
Driver shortages
It is a challenge to meet increased demand and delivery expectations with the well-publicised driver shortage. Overcome this challenge using routing and scheduling software to optimise your fleet deliveries. Existing Descartes customers have increased delivery capacity by 35% without adding vehicles or drivers.
Fleet Costs
Within a fleet of delivery vehicles, there are numerous approaches to cut transportation and fleet costs. But at its core, effective route optimisation and delivery scheduling solutions will increase delivery capacity and save your business time and money while also increasing customer satisfaction with your deliveries.
Market Trends
Market trends constitute a significant driving force in the distribution of food and beverage products. The trends in sustainability and emissions, for instance, are important. It's critical to consider this while optimising your food and beverage supply chain and in particular your distribution network and to turn it into a competitive advantage rather than a daily time consuming challenge.
Cash flow
Digital Proof of delivery will reduce fraudulent claims of damage and reduce the time to process deliveries to reduce the time to invoice deliveries and time to payment.
Logistics Solutions for Food and Beverage Transportation, Distribution and Route Optimisation
Food and beverage suppliers are embracing the next generation of fleet optimisation technology to cut operating costs, increase productivity, and meet higher customer expectations, while ensuring product integrity and security.
Descartes specialises in providing fleet optimisation SaaS solutions to help food and beverage manufacturers, suppliers and distributors improve productivity and reduce costs.
In a single integrated suite, Descartes offers the key capabilities needed to plan and execute efficient delivery routes effectively; communicate with drivers in real-time; improve distribution centre productivity and measure real-time and historical performance – all while taking customer service to the next level.
Solutions & Results
Challenges
- Timely Deliveries
- Efficient Routes
- Fleet Costs
- Sustainability
- Customer Experience
Solutions
- Last mile optimisation
- Route scheduling & planning
- Mileage and fuel saving
- Reduce CO2 and emissions
- Route optimisation
Customer Successes
““Throughout the process, the level of collaboration and effort from the Descartes team to deliver the solution in the way we asked has been amazing.””
Curtis Akerman, Business Process Lead for Delivery
Real-Time Visibility Oversight Complete
Plan vs. Actual Performance Optimal
Fleet Utilisation Reporting Enabled
“Descartes Reservations™ and Route Planner™ solutions were integral to our strategy of offering a more extensive, but unified delivery service. The advanced optimisation capabilities and architecture of the Descartes solutions were critical, bringing new delivery service options to our customers in an economically feasible way. ”
Andrew Gay - Systems Manager
Fulfilment costs reduced £1.8m
Increased delivery productivity 35%
Delivery windows provided at POS
“Descartes' Route Planner™ On-demand helps us have more efficient delivery operations by taking into account our assets, business rules, customer requirements and geographic information. Seamless mobile solution integration ensures we can track actual performance against optimized route plans and address new work or delivery exceptions as they happen to better serve our customers.”
Nimmoo Adam, IT Manager
Delivery temperatures recorded
Delivery costs analysed
Proof of delivery collected
“Descartes route optimisation software was designed to be deployed in an operational capacity to manage collection & distribution rounds. We have now adopted it to respond to calls for tenders and support our regional business units by undertaking centralised optimisation studies”
Charles Fouche, Engineering & Optimisation
New tenders won
Centrailised optimisation
Easy to accomodate unique customer requirements
“We estimate that we've reduced our transport costs by 10% per ton delivered.”
Frédéric Poirier - Logistics & IT Manager
Transport costs reduced by 10%
Optimised mix of own vehicles and third parties
Maximised driver and vehicle utilisation
