Seashore Food Distributors, Inc. - Data Provides Insight into Operations
The Challenge
- Urgency to take advantage of seasonal opportunities exposed need for more flexibility in scheduling and routing
- Demand for better communication with customers, and ability to improve delivery-time estimates
The Solution
Appian DirectRoute™ from TMW Systems
The Results
- System implementation within one day
- Collected data guided decisions to reconfigure fleet
- Routing process reduced to one hour - even during peak season
Seashore Food Distributors, Inc. was established in 1920, and is a leading food distributor in southern New Jersey. Seashore provides a wide range of fresh, frozen, and canned foods to hotels, health-care facilities, restaurants, schools, and other institutions in three mostly rural counties.
Seashore Foods’ base of 25 employees grows to 48 during peak seasons. As Seashore’s business has grown over the past few years, the company’s management realized the company needed to implement a process to allow routes to be generated more quickly and accurately. The time it takes to create routes takes on even more importance during the company’s peak season, which represents 45% of annual volume.
- To automates the routing process.
- To generate routes within one hour, allowing products to be picked, staged and ready for distribution in a timely manner.
- To minimize missed delivery appointments and to better estimate time at a stop. If needed, to be able to contact customers in advance to inform them of time delays.
- Appian DirectRoute from TMW Systems provided Seashore with necessary tools to revolutionize the routing process.
- DirectRoute experts conducted an on-site visit providing one-on-one training for Seashore personnel ensuring optimal software implementation and usage.
- DirectRoute was integrated with the company’s NDS system allowing Seashore to optimize truck routing and to prepare for expansion in future shipping.
- Implementation of the software was extraordinarily quick. Seashore was running DirectRoute live the first day.
- Seashore’s system was automated, allowing routes to be generated in less than an hour, even during peak seasons.
- DirectRoute improved fleet utilization. The software revealed Seashore’s fleet did not match its needs, a factor that caused delivery times to be missed. The company’s management was able to make informed, profitable decisions about fleet configuration.
