Wholesale Grocery Distributor

This privately-owned company supplies wholesale foods to grocery stores from the Mid Atlantic to the deep South.  It runs a fleet of more than 240 tractors and 500 trailers and employs more than 1,700 people.

Since implementing Syntelic's Transportation Solution in 1998, the company has improved the visibility of its transportation operations in all of its complexity.

Business Challenge

The grocery industry is fiercely competitive. A privately held Syntelic wholesale grocery distributor customer points to its 95% on-time delivery rate within a 30-minute window as its key measure of success and a definite competitive advantage. Routes to grocery stores are a combination of straight frozen food runs and mixed runs of dry, refrigerated and frozen products. Trailers are equipped with onboard computers from Cadec Global, Inc., and its transportation division employs a dynamic routing and driver pay system that calculates deliveries by components (per pallet delivered).

As a leader, testing new cost management techniques is a must to remain competitive; thus the management team demands a distribution tracking solution that can quickly and easily crunch all the numbers to provide any variance between plans and actual performance for every route and driver.

Solution

“I don’t see how we could get by without Syntelic,” says the company’s Transportation Systems Supervisor. Without Syntelic, supervisors would not be able to evaluate driver logs efficiently to make needed payroll adjustments and route changes based on what they did compared with the initial route plan.  “We would be limited to word-of-mouth check-ins with no more than one in ten of our drivers,” says the Supervisor.  “Changes would be a manual process and obviously very time consuming.”

Syntelic is considered to be a valuable tool for solving problems and answering questions. Driver managers can guide drivers and give them incentives to improve their performance by viewing route histories vs. plan using a visual timeline graphic.  “I can easily pick out if a driver has moved off his planned route and find out why.”

Results

Given the day-to-day demands on the current system, and the company’s good relationship with Syntelic, the Syntelic web-based and scalable Enterprise Platform represents the next logical step in leveraging the company’s investment since the web-based solution offers additional functionality, dashboard analysis and further reporting and security benefits.

Different roles in the organization today use Syntelic in different ways, and each user can access system information using their own custom view of the information they need in order to do their job effectively.

• Executive management receives regular updates on key performance indicators such as on time delivery rates.

• Route managers can look at outbound routes to calculate optimal backhauls.

• Driver managers can look at driver attendance, punch-in times, and route performance.

• Payroll can make adjustments based on actual performance.

• The Transportation Systems Supervisor can evaluate equipment utilization and recommend capital investments.

If any manager or executive poses a new question or needs a more information, Syntelic offers the flexibility to pull information into customized dashboards and filter out whatever is less than relevant.

The company has continued to grow in a tough economy by successfully promoting its stellar track record for on-time deliveries to win new business and keep satisfied customers. “The grocery store business has narrow profit margins,” says the company’s Transportation Systems Supervisor. “When we say we are going to be at a store at a certain time, they depend on that. They can’t afford to keep personnel standing around waiting for the delivery truck.”

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