Major water cooler supplier makes changes to delivery network with GeoConcept

Thirsty Work, the premier UK supplier of water coolers to the workplace, has cut around 200,000 km of travel from its monthly delivery cycle by remodelling its distribution network with GeoConcept, the leading geographic information system. And now the system is helping the company to exploit market opportunities more effectively.

GeoConcept was supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics, along with the TruckStops routing and scheduling system, which Thirsty Work has used to optimise the delivery routes operated from its revised depot network. Kingswood MapMechanics sells and supports both these products in Britain.

The initial exercise followed a series of company acquisitions by Thirsty Work, whose network had expanded rapidly in the space of two years to eight depots. Operations director Gavin Brice explains: “We ended up with a massive overlap of customers between depots, and needed some sophisticated software to help us understand our customer base and service territories.”

With GeoConcept, the company was able to map its customer base to depots, and to see where customers were and how many each depot was serving. Then it used a GeoConcept facility to calculate the delivery distance to each customer, and work out which depot was best-placed to serve it. “That in turn enabled us to address related issues, such as whether each depot was big enough,” Gavin Brice says.

One of the attractions of GeoConcept, he adds, was that it was so easy to use for such a powerful product. “It took just a couple of days’ training to get us up and running.”

The end result has been a programme to migrate 8,000 customers between depots. “We knew it would be a high number, but we never guessed it would be that many.”

At two depots (Bournemouth and Slough), he says, there has been an 80 per cent switch of customers between territories. “That’s because historically, two acquired companies had expanded into each other’s areas.” And in the London area, “we unravelled a complex pattern of overlapping deliveries. Sometimes two drivers were delivering to the same street.” In place of four depots, the company is now able to serve the area with three.

The change management programme was conducted over four demanding weeks. “It was a massive exercise in knowledge transfer,” Gavin Brice says. To ease the process, during the run-up to the changeover drivers were encouraged to write down delivery details on their documentation as a guide for those who would replace them. In London’s City area, the company ran a “buddy” programme, in which incoming drivers accompanied the outgoing ones on major account deliveries to learn the ropes.

Now that the initial depot remodelling exercise has been completed, Thirsty Work is using the same software tools on an ongoing basis to help both with strategic market planning and to fine-tune its delivery efficiency.

In particular, the company is harnessing the analytical and presentational powers of GeoConcept. “Having been through a very rapid growth phase, we’re now aiming to capitalise on our national presence by finding areas where we have spare capacity and there’s good business potential,” Gavin Brice says.

The company’s approach has been to take a commercially available marketing database, map it to geographical locations with GeoConcept, then superimpose Thirsty Work’s existing customer base and find areas of maximum commercial gain. The company maps prospective customers by “cooler opportunity”, which means segmenting the market by type of company and likely number of coolers per site, and omitting business types known to be poor prospects.

“You always get an amazing response when you show a chief executive a map,” Gavin Brice says. “It really does stimulate great debate, and raises all the right questions. It performs calculations in moments that otherwise would take weeks.”

A pilot exercise has been conducted in the Bristol area, and the next phase will involve buying a more advanced marketing database from Kingswood MapMechanics and extending the scheme to other areas.

Meanwhile, Thirsty Work has been using the TruckStops routing and scheduling system to improve the efficiency of its delivery network. Initially the software was used to optimise fixed routes, but Gavin Brice points out that because the market is so volatile (being dependent on factors such as the weather), demand can vary widely within those routes.

“So we’re moving to a situation where we will be able to reschedule routes from day to day to reflect actual customer demand.” Dynamic scheduling will be tried at a single depot first, he says, then rolled out across the country. The aim is to run the system centrally, linking it with the company’s in-house MINC order processing system and feeding the results out to depots by wide-area network.

As a further refinement, the company is aiming to take advantage of a newly-launched version of the system called TruckStops Roads, which can interact with GeoConcept to print out detailed local maps of delivery points. “This will be ideal in situations where routes have to be switched between drivers.”

Thirsty Work is a subsidiary of Well Well Well, Britain’s largest mineral water bottler, whose other brands include Ashe Park, Aqua-Pura and Stretton Hills. It markets only the highest-quality natural mineral water, which is sourced from production plants in Hampshire and Cumbria. The water is trunked to its eight regional depots, and then delivered to customers with a fleet of 100 delivery vehicles, mainly 3.5-tonne and 7.5-tonners (plus a handful of 13-tonners). The standard cooler contains 18.9 litres (5 gal) of water, a quantity deriving from practice in the United States, where the concept originated.