The Brakes Group is the UK’s leading supplier to the catering industry.  Operating in an extremely competitive industry, there is constant pressure on margins. Consistent high quality service and cost effective pricing are critical to winning and retaining customers.

 

The Optrak vehicle routing  and scheduling solution is used at Brakes’s Egham depot to dynamically schedule a fleet of 80 vehicles delivering grocery orders, ambient, chilled and frozen goods.  In-cab communications and SatNav/fleet tracking are fully integrated with Optrak Business Intelligence and Optrak Real-Time to drive Brakes’ depot operations.

 

“Brakes set out to find new ways of driving costs out of the supply chain and succeeded in reducing year on year costs by 8% whilst gaining significant added benefits in customer service.”

“We chose Optrak because of its proven expertise in the food and drink sector and the availability of dynamic real-time planning, supplemented with their unique Optrak Business Intelligence dashboard and reporting functionality.”

Neil Heavisides, Depot Manager

 

Background                    

A fleet of multi-temperature vehicles delivers daily orders in excess of 1,600.  Originally orders were allocated to fixed routes based on the customer postcodes, however this resulted in under or over utilised trips.  An added complication is that some goods are delivered on pallets and others on roll cages.

 

Orders are day 1 for day 2 and are taken by a telesales team up until 4.30pm.  These are entered on two back office systems – grocery orders on Concerto, frozen orders on SAP.  To add to the complexity, chilled orders can come from either system.  However it was not possible to link orders from both systems to a single customer record so customers occasionally received their deliveries on two different vehicles.

 

There is a tight time window for planning as picking must start by 6pm.  Whilst the planners were doing a good job with limited resources, Brakes knew that automating routing and scheduling would cut distribution costs.  This coincided with the introduction of formal customer time windows and documented vehicle access restrictions at customer premises.

 

“We wanted to introduce more efficient planning with Optrak but also to enable drivers to work effectively within a dynamic scheduling environment.  The project therefore expanded to look at integrating in-cab communications, satellite navigation and vehicle routing – it is testament to the design and power of the Optrak vehicle routing solution that it coped with everything that we threw at it.

Of the available vehicle routing solutions, Optrak’s major advantage was that it had the flexibility to cope with the range of demanding requirements at Brakes, including complex loading for multi-temperature vehicles. As a supplier, Optrak were willing to work closely with us on creating a new, highly automated, world class supply chain.”

John Burgess, Operations Manager

Putting Optrak at the heart of a sophisticated supply chain

 

Brakes have implemented a sophisticated supply chain solution that simplifies and automates the planning process.  The Optrak vehicle routing solution, Optrak Real-Time and Optrak Business Intelligence are linked in to multiple systems and processes at Brakes and drive depot and customer service operations.

 

The planning process starts at 4.30pm when orders are downloaded into Optrak via an SQL database.  Within this database there is an automated process to combine all orders into a single customer-centric view, allowing multi-part orders to be delivered on a single vehicle.  Optrak provides sophisticated load management capabilities that automatically solves loading issues that arise from mixing pallets and roll cages on Brakes’ multi- temperature vehicles and produces a loading scheme.

The scheduler follows the built-in customised Process Menu that simplifies each of the steps in the routing process to a single mouse click.  The scheduler plans certain orders first, e.g. Isle of Wight orders, big multi-pallet orders for the airlines, and any orders with a frozen element.  The rest of the orders are scheduled around the trips that have already been created, thus maximising the utilisation of vehicles that have already been committed to deliveries.

 

The scheduler reviews the schedule using local knowledge to fine tune and finalise the routes.  By 6pm, the results are uploaded back to SAP and Concerto.  The trip numbers and sequence numbers for each of the orders is then passed to the voice picking software in the paperless warehouse to guide the picking operator.

 

Picking and loading is finished by 6am and the actual vehicle registration numbers for each truck are confirmed back into Optrak.  This information is then sent to the relevant I-Trace Siemens unit in each cab.  The SiemensVDO unit has been customised to capture information and relay it back to Optrak; it also displays relevant information such as a list of drops, addresses, order numbers, quantities, and any other delivery instructions.

 

Real-time monitoring of actual delivery picture

 

When the driver is ready to go out, they log on to I-Trace via a secure key fob, choose the first delivery from a drop down of the daily manifest and accept the job.  This information is sent back to the Optrak Business Intelligence system which is monitored by the Brakes customer services team.

 

The Siemens SatNav navigates the driver to the drop via on screen and voice prompts.  Once at the customer site, the driver uses the Siemens unit to indicate arrival and when the delivery is completed, it captures a departure time.  This information is recorded by Optrak Business Intelligence and stored for analysis and reporting.

 

Brakes’ customer services team constantly monitor the status of each trip.  This can be done visually as the real-time position of all vehicles is sent back to Optrak and overlaid onto a roadmap within Optrak Business Intelligence, or the system can automatically flag up where issues are arising before they have impacted on the customer.  For example, if a delivery is going to be late, the customer services team can proactively call the customer and if necessary reschedule the delivery.

 

If for any reason the delivery fails, e.g. customer is not available, this is recorded by the Siemens unit which updates Optrak and an order for the next day is automatically created thus minimising manual data entry.

  

Exploiting telematics and routing information  

 

Brakes needed a telematics solution that could interface fully with a routing system and was pleased to find that Optrak works well with I-Trace, particularly as its research had shown that not all telematics and routing systems can be integrated to operate in real-time along fully bi-directional lines of communication.

 

“We were able to tailor Optrak to do exactly what we wanted it to do, which is not always possible with other real-time routing systems.”

John Burgess, Operations Manager

 

Data from every aspect of the actual and planned schedule is stored in an Optrak data warehouse.  This information is regularly analysed to find new ways of improving distribution operations, e.g. if Brakes can improve the accuracy of each drop time by just two minutes, an extra two or three orders could be delivered per vehicle.  This philosophy of continual improvement is present throughout Brakes and has seen customer service levels continue to improve.

  

Operational KPIs improve across the board  

 

Brakes monitor a number of KPIs, including Km/drop and number of drops per vehicle.  The KPIs across the board are more favourable; using Optrak has reduced the number of trips by 6% and allowed Brakes to take on more orders without needing to invest in additional vehicles and drivers. Productivity, flexibility, utilisation and service capability have all improved.

Having advance notice of problems before they can impact deliveries turned out to be as much of a benefit as the cost savings, as customer satisfaction and customer retention rates have improved.

Burgess agrees that implementing Optrak has been worthwhile:

“In our competitive industry, the ability to proactively set and meet customer expectations is a key part of our competitiveness and remains a differentiator for Brakes.  Without the automation provided by Optrak and its real-time and business intelligence applications, it simply would not be possible or practical to manage the customer expectations in the same way.”

 

Constantly increasing benefits leave Brakes hungry for more

 

“We were able to customise Optrak and the end result is a solution that meets our precise, complex requirements.  Working with Optrak gave us access to a team of world class supply chain consultants, who invested time in understanding exactly how our business worked and how Optrak could be used to support our distribution operations.  Without this we wouldn’t have achieved the same scale of benefits that we are seeing,” Burgess concludes, “We have gained real advantages in terms of improved reporting, and greater real-time visibility of our distribution operations leading to improved customer service.  The benefit of this project will be felt for years to come and I would certainly recommend Optrak to other companies.”

 

The most recent enhancement at Brakes has been the implementation of Canbus loggers.  Optrak Business Intelligence has been extended to provide analysis and reporting on vehicle/driver performance against different criteria, which Optrak research indicates could lead to 5-10% fuel savings.

 

Tim Pigden, Managing Director, Optrak explains why the project at Brakes underlines why the ‘the one size fits all approach’ of other vendors would not have succeeded, “Brakes unique and demanding requirements could only be met by bringing together telematics, business intelligence and the flexibility of the Optrak vehicle routing system.  Brakes have confirmed their position as an innovative supplier that has re-engineered their supply chain around the customer to provide outstanding levels of service.  There remains scope for Brakes to continue to leverage their investment and this will create new opportunities to improve their distribution operations.”