TruckStops brings dramatic improvements for fine food distributor

West Country Fine Foods, a specialist distributor of premium chilled and frozen foods to the hotel and catering market, has introduced the TruckStops routing and scheduling system from Kingswood MapMechanics to plan its deliveries nationwide, and says it has already had a dramatic effect on costs, customer service levels and operating efficiency.

“In purely financial terms, TruckStops paid for itself within just two months,” says commercial director Andrew Marshall. “Yet although that’s remarkable enough in itself, it’s only part of the story. The improvement in customer service is the real benefit.”

West Country Fine Foods distributes across a large part of mainland Britain from a network of four bases, and accepts orders right up to midnight for delivery next day. Most orders only come in between 8pm and midnight, but all vehicles must then be loaded and despatched by around 5am; so there is no room for inefficiency in the routing and scheduling process.

Previously, delivery schedules were worked out manually, but in an operation with around 3,000 live accounts, this was a highly complex process and led to inevitable anomalies. “Some journeys could be completed in five hours, whereas others took eleven,” says Andrew Marshall. Moreover, he says drivers were left to plan their own routes, and were not necessarily tackling them as cost-effectively as they might.

Using TruckStops, the company has been able to balance deliveries much more evenly among vehicles, and plan routes that are far more efficient. As a result, it has immediately saved thousands of pounds a month in fuel, wear and tear and depreciation, and it has also saved on the number of vehicles required.

Drivers were consulted throughout the implementation programme. “We had meetings at all the depots,” Andrew Marshall says, “and the drivers saw for themselves how schedules could be improved. There was only one who didn’t believe the benefits we demonstrated, and even he was soon convinced.”

TruckStops will now be used every three months to re-plan the company’s fixed routes and test the impact of adding new customers or changing load volumes.

TruckStops was introduced as part of scheme led by consultant Robin Eales to improve West Country Fine Foods’ overall logistics efficiency. A shortlist of routing and scheduling systems was drawn up, and TruckStops was chosen from the last two. “TruckStops won because it produced the result we wanted and was simple to use,” Andrew Marshall says. “It’s extremely intuitive and user-friendly. No one is frightened of it. The alternative system may have looked good, but TruckStops was more effective where it mattered.”

Mr Marshall also pays tribute to the input of the team at Kingswood MapMechanics, which supplies and supports TruckStops in Britain. “They provided first-class training and backup, and if we changed our mind about anything, they came through with an answer every time.

“I rarely give testimonials, but this is one occasion where I have no hesitation in doing so.”

The full TruckStops Professional package supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics includes the option to calculate routes from road network maps, plus ITIS road speeds. This is the feature that allocates real-world average roads speeds to every road link, taking data from a pool of 50,000 vehicles monitored in real time in daily service on Britain’s roads.

West Country Fine Foods has also taken a full copy of GeoConcept, the geographic information system supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics, which can be used in close conjunction with TruckStops to analyse and fine-tune logistics activities, as well as performing wider network planning and marketing activities.

“Bringing GeoConcept fully into play is the next step in our programme,” says Andrew Marshall, who adds: “We’re already seeing benefits from the TruckStops system beyond pure logistics activities. For instance, it enables us to see the profitability of individual routes. We plan to expand on this capability as we go forward.”

West Country Fine Foods is based at Codford St Mary in Wiltshire, and also has bases at Newton Abbott, Bristol and Warrington. It serves most of the western half of the country, using a fleet of refrigerated Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 3.5-tonne vans, which since the introduction of TruckStops has been around 30-strong.

“We’re essentially a distribution company,” says Andrew Marshall. “Naturally we offer the right product at the right price, but service is what we’re really about. We take in product in large quantities and ship it out in small quantities, and we need to do this as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible. TruckStops has made a major contribution to that objective.”