How one coffee vendor perked up its business

Coffee supplier Standard Cos. has dropped its old pins-on-a-map routing system in favor of a software application.

By Staff -- Logistics Management, 6/1/1999

The drivers at Standard Cos. Inc. no longer have "bad pin days"--days where their time is wasted because a misplaced pushpin on a map sends them off in the wrong direction. They now can find their way to new customers' facilities without a hitch. And although the company's business is up, costs are down. What has brought about all this change? A software program that handles delivery routing.

The Standard Cos. Inc., headquartered in New Orleans, sells and delivers coffee and other beverages to some 70,000 customers throughout the country. Its customers include restaurants, convenience stores, delis, and office buildings.

Standard's drivers--or route sales representatives, as they're known in the trade--have between eight and 10 hours a day to service their routes. The drivers traditionally have visited each customer once every three weeks both to deliver orders and to sell products.

Increased Face Time

Back in 1997, Standard's management realized that the company would have to optimize the drivers' routing schedules if it wanted to make more time available for them to sell products. Schedule optimization would mean increasing route density, minimizing travel time, and maximizing the amount of time the representatives had to serve their clients. "We wanted more face time with the customer," explains Joseph Holmes, project manager.

Schedule optimization wasn't an easy job because of varying customer requirements. Some customers needed more products than others and had to be serviced more than once during the three-week cycle. Complicating matters, routes frequently had to be rearranged as customers initiated or discontinued service.

In the past, route mapping had been the responsibility of the representatives and their local field management. The representatives plotted their courses by hand, using pushpins on off-the-shelf roadmaps to designate delivery routes. Pin placement on the wrong side of the street could lead to an extra 5 to 10 minutes of travel time. With an average of 230 customers on a route, those extra minutes added up to wasted hours.

To create more accurate routes, Standard began investigating and evaluating route mapping systems. After a vendor review, it selected an application called RouteSmart from Route-Smart Technologies in Columbia, Md. "We chose RouteSmart primarily because it was the best value available considering what we were going to accomplish with it," says Anthony Gregario, Standard's vice president of finance.

The software program produces detailed route maps and directions for Standard's approximately 300 representatives. As a result of RouteSmart's initial analysis, delivery routes were adjusted to make sales and service calls more efficient, although Standard did not actually centralize route development for the company. "We give field management the tool to make better decisions," Holmes says. "The final decisions still rest with field management, but we're now able to develop much more accurate and efficient routing."

Though the application was implemented to make existing routes more efficient, Holmes reports that his company has begun using the software in its efforts to replace the traditional three-week delivery cycle. Now drivers are using a 1-2-4 week cycle in which the driver visits a customer either once a week, twice a week, or once a month based on the customer's sales volume and needs. "The 1-2-4 schedule gains us the ability to serve more customers within a reasonable amount of time and provide better utilization of our assets," Holmes explains.

No More Maps and Pins

The operating efficiencies achieved through software optimization have resulted in a 15-percent reduction in route mileage for the drivers, and that's a conservative assessment, Holmes says. Because of that, he reports, Standard has been able to recoup its investment in well under a year. "It's proven to be time saving and money saving as well as a tool that's a benefit to the field management," says Holmes. "The field management now refers to this [approach] as traditional. We wouldn't even think of going back to the old system of maps and pins."