National Pizza Chain

A national pizza chain that has centralized food preparation and distribution in supplying its nationwide network of 5,000 store locations, manages a private fleet of 200 tractors supplying out of 15+ distribution centers.

Business Challenge

Supplying more than 5,000 stores nationwide out of 16 distribution centers, this well known company achieves an impressive on-time delivery rate of 98 percent. The company’s Supply Chain Services division centralizes the preparation of dough and other ingredients to maintain high quality food standards while supplying its store locations with some 240 products. It manages a private fleet of more than 200 tractors on a mix of short routes and routes as long as 1,500 miles. “Our locations are small businesses that need to be able to depend on on-time delivery times because that helps them control costs,” says the company's transportation coordinator.

The distributor relies on UPS Roadnet software for route planning and PeopleNet on board computers (OBCs) throughout its fleet. Having adopted Syntelic Distribution Tracking solution a decade ago, it wanted to leverage these investments across all of its distribution centers to aggressively manage costs down to the individual route level.

Solution

In 2004, the company assessed its use of Syntelic's Transportation Solution to ensure that each of its 16 distribution centers could rely on corporate benchmarks for planning and budgeting routes while achieving gains in efficiency and the associated cost savings.
Employing a “train-the-trainers” model, and assisted by Syntelic’s product support team, the company made sure that multiple users at each of its distribution centers knew how to employ Syntelic as a customizable dashboard for evaluating their own key performance indicators (KPIs). The goal: greater visibility for transportation operation and better business intelligence.

The company is now considering upgrading to Syntelic's web-based Enterprise platform for the ability to view multiple parameters among any of its distribution centers.

Results

With the data imported from the routing system and fleet’s OBCs, Syntelic ensures data integrity and also lets users target performance improvements. The company tracks the metric of cost-per-pound for such factors as:

• Fuel usage

• Equipment

• Labor

• Back haul opportunities

Says the company's Transportation Coordinator, “Syntelic saves a lot of time. The formulas are set up to slice and dice imported data. You just select your date range, push a button and the system generates the solution.”

Perhaps the most valuable tool Syntelic provides is the visual timeline that compares planned versus actual routes. The software is designed for quick drill down on individual drivers and routes to evaluate details such as stop sequences and delivery times. “You can see at both a high level and get the detailed view of any variances between planned cost-per-pound and actual,” says Schellenberger. Each week, the home office also compares the variances among distribution centers to identify opportunities to improve performance and share best practices. “Syntelic is an effective tool for making these discussions concrete and specific. It provides accountability,” he notes.

“I can’t imagine trying to do what we do without Syntelic,” he says. “Reports out of PeopleNet are static views of routes and drivers and are not designed to allow you to select your criteria and drill down the way you can in Syntelic DT in minutes.”

As a budgeting tool, the pizza chain uses DT to extract a weighted average of costs out of the systems as the starting point so managers do not have to spend a lot of time manually calculating budgets.