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“Substantial savings” in workwear rental collection and delivery costs are reported by Johnson Service Group following the first stages of a programme to streamline and reorganise the transport network of its subsidiary company Johnson Apparelmaster.
Johnson has been working closely on the project with logistics and digital mapping specialist Kingswood MapMechanics, which has supplied the TruckStops routing and scheduling system to provide core functionality. This has been used both to remodel the organisation’s fixed delivery patterns, and to help with a “customer migration” programme involving the transfer of accounts between branches. |
In a parallel initiative, Kingswood MapMechanics has also been helping the Johnson group with a range of customer profiling and market analysis exercises, for which it has supplied the GeoConcept geographical information system. This has already enabled Johnson to reshape its national sales territories and plan an expansion programme in the London area.
Johnson Apparelmaster is the UK’s leading workwear rental specialist, operating from a network of 17 laundry and distribution bases throughout Britain and Northern Ireland. It serves around 40,000 customers with a fleet of 275 vans. Its network has grown steadily through a series of acquisitions, during which it built up a customer base in which not all users were being served by the most logical branch.
Initially a demonstration project was mounted with GeoConcept, using colour coding to highlight the disposition of customer locations in relation to a sample group of Johnson Apparelmaster branches, and give some indication of the potential for transferring customers between them.
This confirmed the opportunity for savings, so the group then evaluated several leading routing and scheduling systems to determine the best for the job. “TruckStops offered the best return on investment relative to initial cost,” says corporate strategy director Simon Moate, “and also seemed to us the best structured in terms of its ability to model fixed delivery rounds.”
The company has opted for the latest TruckStops Roads version, which can plan routes in relation to a digital map network as well as by its well-established time and distance method. Johnson has also taken a module called Route Reporter, which automatically generates a line of route report for delivery schedules produced by TruckStops, showing times and distances to each stop. These calculations are normally performed by a runtime version of GeoConcept, although in this case the company is also using the full version.
Regular Kingswood MapMechanics consultant Tony Griffiths was appointed to work on the project, and Johnson also seconded two internal staff to the programme – an IT executive and a transport manager. “Clever though TruckStops is, this is the kind of complex exercise where you won’t get results unless you also commit resources and people who understand real-world issues,” Simon Moate says.
The programme is being rolled out on a region-by-region basis. The first branch to benefit was the one at Bootle in Merseyside, where the whole Johnson group is based. “TruckStops helped us re-route the vehicles and drive through operating efficiencies,” Simon Moate reports. “So far the savings are in the order of four per cent, which with our volume of business is substantial.”
Next in line was the Gateshead branch, where the company needed to assimilate the customers of a recently-acquired subsidiary, Hirelin. Here again, substantial savings have resulted. “After that will come a radical review of our Midlands operations, where we have four laundries. We envisage migrating customers, rationalising operations and re-routing vehicles, and we anticipate really significant savings.”
Consultant Tony Griffiths saw the project through its first half-year, and Johnson will now continue to roll out the programme over the next twelve months.
Meanwhile, GeoConcept has been playing a key role in helping Johnson to reshape its 40 national sales territories, ensuring that each sales representative has a territory of roughly equal value and equal business opportunity. “This would be exceptionally difficult to do without a product like GeoConcept,” Simon Moate says. “There is too much complexity to evaluate by conventional means.”
In a separate exercise, Johnson has been using GeoConcept to help plan an expansion programme for its Johnson Dry Cleaners retail network within the M25 area. The group is working with a leading supermarket chain, and wanted to identify its top 50 locations within the area in terms of the numbers of target customers (the ABC1 demographic group) within easy reach. This would help it decide where to position new dry cleaning outlets. Prizm demographic data was used to identify customer types, and GeoConcept was able to show the numbers within reach of each branch.
The group’s marketing and transport network analysis programmes converge in a further project now under way. Having restructured Johnson Apparel delivery and collection routes, the organisation wanted to maximise the opportunities for gaining incremental business along the revised corridors. By modelling the routes in GeoConcept and superimposing Blue Sheep business data on them, the company hopes to identify potential new clients by SIC (Standard Industrial Classification), as well as mapping existing market penetration.
Summing up, Simon Moate comments: “TruckStops alone won’t give you all the network planning answers, but it allows you to manipulate significant amounts of data quickly and efficiently. Similarly GeoConcept gives you enormous analytical power if you use it intelligently. So far we’re very pleased with what we’ve achieved on both counts.” |
