Customer Profile
550 light commercial vehicles, specialist in contracts requiring a high level of security and proven custody chains, works with NHS, local authorities, laboratory testing companies, financial institutions, retail, food distribution, passenger transport and transport businesses.
Challenge
Global Service Group (GSG) is a bespoke logistics provider specialising in high-value, critical deliveries for organisations such as Thames Water and the NHS. It operates a fleet of more than 550 light commercial vehicles. GSG required a system to optimise the delivery of flowers to up to 3,000 residential addresses per day. The company initially used a combination of Microsoft MapPoint and drivers’ local knowledge to plan deliveries. As the contract grew, GSG turned to Trakm8 to enhance both the efficiency of its delivery operations and reduce planning time.
Deployment
Trakm8’s Route Monkey software provided GSG with a complete route optimisation and scheduling solution. GSG imports all jobs into Trakm8’s software, which computes the next day’s deliveries using the minimal number of vans and lowest cumulative mileage. It also produces an individual daily manifest for each driver. Crucially, the algorithm’s dynamic optimisation capabilities mean that it can update schedules to take account of local traffic conditions, drop times at specific sites, and traffic events which disrupt routes.
Results
Route Monkey achieved a 20% saving in fleet mileage for GSG’s flower delivery contract, as well as a significant saving in transport planning resource. Following this success, GSG rolled out Optimisation to its other contracts, where the algorithms achieved savings of 15% to 18%.
“We now describe complex scenarios to Trakm8 Optimisation, with multiple timed collections, limited vehicles and delivery within four hours of collection, and they simply make it work for us. Every time.” Rob Berringer, Managing Director, Global Service Group
