The challenge for John Mitchell Haulage and Warehousing is to deliver outstanding value and service for customers while minimizing operational costs and improving safety. The company, which started with a single vehicle in 1956 and now operates 122 vehicles with 130 drivers, faces the dual pressures of maintaining high customer service standards and controlling costs in an industry with notoriously slim profit margins.

In 2009, Brit European faced significant challenges as the global economy headed for recession. The company had a base of fixed costs not tied to activity levels, adding additional pressure. Tough decisions were needed to ensure Brit European remained a successful business. The company embarked on an Environmental Efficiency Project to use equipment design, aerodynamics, technology, staff training, and alternative fuels to drive down environmental impact and operational efficiency. The project aimed to reduce carbon emissions across the fleet by 25% and minimize the intrinsic link to oil prices by using compressed natural gas as a fuel.

The Co-operative Food, operating over 1,000 vehicles and making 1,300 trips daily to 3,300 retail outlets, faced challenges in streamlining transport and delivery operations, improving customer service, and reducing paperwork. The main business driver was to increase fleet visibility, improve fleet productivity and utilization, and enhance service to stores. The Co-operative needed a solution that could handle both fixed and ad hoc routes, manage route and schedule adherence, and provide real-time updates to drivers and the transport operation team.

In 2012, Maritime Transport, the UK’s largest container transport operator, was looking for ways to increase efficiencies across the operation. The company was looking to find a telematics technology partner, capable of supporting a wider initiative to innovate with technology and data. After exploring options in the market, Maritime partnered with Microlise, with telematics introduced across the fleet of 700 vehicles. The solution put in place provided insight into driver and vehicle performance, and allowed Maritime to track the location of assets, understanding how they were being utilised, allowing for increases in fleet utilisation. Initially, Maritime focused at addressing areas where efficiencies could more readily be achieved, before later looking at more innovative ways to make use of the data collected and intelligence gained, and expanding the solution to 1,000 vehicles as the fleet grew.

Nationwide Platforms, a leader in powered access platforms, faced challenges in reducing fuel costs and increasing safety across its fleet of over one hundred delivery vehicles in the UK. The company needed real-time visibility of its vehicles to enhance service levels, increase utilisation, and improve deployment capabilities. The primary focus was on leveraging telematics to gain insights into driver performance, vehicle health, and fuel consumption, while also ensuring the solution could evolve with the company's changing needs.

Until recently, all businesses within the Travis Perkins group had a very manual process when it came to deliveries. With a reliance on paper-based processes they wanted to find a more efficient, easier way of providing a signature to customers in an electronic format, whilst boosting safety and improving delivery accuracy and giving drivers the tools they need.

Culligan, a market leader in water treatment, faced significant challenges in optimizing the planning and scheduling of its skilled technicians. The company offers a unique business service to its customers, including equipment maintenance, which complicates the visits and schedules of delivery personnel, technicians, and installers. Specific challenges included managing hundreds of technicians and installers, handling 80% recurring services, integrating emergencies and repairs, and maintaining high-frequency water delivery schedules. Culligan needed an optimized solution to manage 230 mobile resources in real-time, reduce mileage between visits, gain visibility into schedules for at least a month, move to a shared electronic format, and harmonize best practices across multiple markets.

The Challenge for C-discount.com: Optimizing the delivery of millions of products each year. Founded in 2008, C-discount.com is a last-mile delivery branch of the Casino Group, principally managing home delivery, from its logistics hub to dozens of regional agencies and offices. To sustain C-discount.com’s steady growth, it quickly became of paramount importance for the company to consider: setting up a centralized and automated appointment booking and home delivery workflow (with electronic delivery notes); real-time and continuous optimization of volume-driven appointment scheduling. With several hundred thousand products to deliver, Cdiscount.com must be able to integrate into its information system a tool that takes into account all the required delivery parameters, such as the nature of the product, its size, delivery staff’s capabilities, the type of service required as well as the client’s.

The challenge for Domino's Pizza: Optimizing the management of the supply route itineraries of its countless sales outlets. Domino’s Pizza operates a network of franchised pizza delivery and takeaway sales outlets. The brand is one of the only ones to use fresh dough for its pizzas that is guaranteed never to have been frozen and offers pizzas made to order, currently positioning itself as the leader in the delivered and takeaway pizza market. Domino’s Pizza has many productions and logistics centers where it produces the fresh pizza dough and provides other food products (salads and desserts) and merchandising (caps, t-shirts). These products are ordered by the network’s various sales outlets via a buying hub and are then transported to the outlets two or three times a week. Each vehicle is responsible for one supply route. On average, it carries 3 to 4 loads of fresh and dry ingredients and between 6 and 8 stacks of pizza dough platters, which requires controlled temperature delivery in order to maintain the cold chain throughout the route. To sustain its strong growth worldwide, Domino’s Pizza wanted to optimize its supply route organization so as to be able to respond efficiently to the challenges associated with the increased order volume. The brand was looking to be able to incorporate into its information system a solution that allows the definition of logical route itineraries and reduces the travel time of each transport movement to all its outlets in all strategic territories in which the company’s activities are experiencing rapid growth. All the deliveries, necessary parameters such as for these the characteristics of the ordered products, the volume they occupy, and the location of the sales outlets to be supplied also had to be included in the tool.

ENGIE Solutions faces the challenge of managing a diverse range of installations, including boilers, air-cooling towers, cogeneration power systems, and heating and refrigeration networks. Each installation requires different types of expertise and is subject to various regulations, making the scheduling of maintenance interventions complex. The company needs to ensure that all regulatory visits and operational maintenance interventions are carried out on time, while also taking into account customer constraints and the legal number of working hours per day. Additionally, the company aims to achieve convergence of tools and processes across its agencies to improve efficiency and service delivery.

Croatian Post, the national postal operator in Croatia, faced the challenge of making the delivery of 38 million parcels each year more efficient. The organization aimed to stabilize its core business by streamlining transportation and reducing delivery and distribution costs. With approximately 10,000 workers and more than 1,000 postal offices, managing such a large-scale operation required a comprehensive solution to monitor and optimize their fleet of over 3,000 vehicles. The primary goal was to reduce vehicle misuse, manage costs better, and improve overall fleet efficiency.

Business challenges for Posti included measuring and increasing delivery efficiency, improving operating scenarios, and increasing cost savings throughout the organization. From an operations perspective, Posti needed to measure, plan, and optimize its routes, as well as perform analytic modeling to more effectively react to changing delivery volumes. To start, Posti first had to integrate RouteSmart into its existing infrastructure and improve geographic data such as delivery location information and street data for all of their service areas. Posti’s ambitious goal of 5% targeted cost savings at each delivery center needed to be met by decreasing total travel distances, effectively modeling the proper number of routes based on delivery volumes, and increasing vehicle utilization. In addition, Posti desired to achieve even higher service reliability.

The Swiss Post has been delivering mail throughout Switzerland since 1849. This public limited company services vastly different geographic areas, ranging from the country’s lowlands, to the mountains, to large cosmopolitan cities like Geneva and Zürich. The Head for Route Planning and Editing, Markus Steinmann, together with his team of Routing Specialists, has reorganized over 2,300 routes in more than 90 facilities. The verification of the sequences by the Delivery Team Manager was initially completed on paper (manually), then moved to Microsoft Excel and color coded maps. As Switzerland grew, the buildings, related traffic, and mail volume increased. Using an Oracle Database, new delivery points were added manually at the apparent best sequence based on information from the mail sorting centers. The process was not ideal because new points were added where routes had capacity, causing the routes to become less geographically compact, and increasing travel times. Realizing the inefficiencies of this system, local management reached out to Steinmann and his team to reorganize their routes. They had already integrated GIS and geocoded every building, as well as every post box – over 1.7 million addresses. Steinmann and his team were able to visualize the routes electronically, but sought a tool that would set them on the road to improvement.

Whistl aimed to launch a national final mile delivery service within the UK, providing competition to Royal Mail for the first time in over 370 years. The company needed to create thousands of jobs and invest significantly in technology and infrastructure. One key challenge was the creation of new postal routes to meet specific service targets, requiring a GIS-based tool to assist planners and automate route creation based on varying mail volumes.

The underlying trend within postal markets globally has been one of declining volumes over recent years. As mail volumes decline, the pressure on reducing all costs increases. Delivery costs represent the largest single element of cost. They are also the most time consuming and complex to analyze. It is against this background that the Isle of Man Post Office invested in the RouteSmart software from Integrated Skills Limited (ISL). Traditionally delivery routes have been constructed after intensive work study analysis of each route. This involves a work study officer rating the performance of the delivery postman to create data about each route and overlaying this information with other data such as volumes handled and call rates. The process was time consuming and sometimes led to error and inconsistencies – and therefore rework. Despite the professional training and expertise of the work study practitioner the analysis was subjective.

Gateshead Council faced the challenge of making their Waste Management Services more efficient. They needed to address the collection of both residual waste and recycling while maintaining a good service to 90,000 properties in the Council Borough. The primary goal was to find ways to optimize routes to save time, money, and resources.

A regional initiative funded by the North East Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnership (RIEP) aimed to optimize the efficiency of waste collection routes using RouteSmart software. The focus was on reducing vehicle and fuel usage through route reconfiguration, maximizing vehicle payloads, and reducing collection costs. Of the 12 authorities in the North East UK, 11 participated in this initiative. Several authorities reduced their working week to four days, allowing vehicles to be utilized elsewhere, and introduced zonal working to improve service efficiency and reliability. In some cases, there was integration of commercial waste collection with household waste, ensuring that tonnages collected per route were maximized and balanced across the routes.

The City of Richardson, Texas, with approximately 100,000 residents, faced inefficiencies in their Brush and Bulky Item Collection (BABIC) program. The routes were manually designed by drivers within assigned grids, leading to imbalances in workloads and inefficient travel paths. This resulted in wasted man-hours, increased fuel consumption, and excessive wear and tear on city vehicles. The city needed a solution to optimize these routes and improve overall efficiency.

GeoCo, a Netherlands-based consultancy, faced the challenge of optimizing waste and recycling collection routes for municipalities. The company needed a robust solution to enhance route planning, reduce fleet size, mileage, and planning time, and provide more balanced routes and accurate ETAs. GeoCo sought to improve operational efficiency and environmental impact through better route management.

In 2007, Woodbridge Township’s Department of Public Works faced a significant challenge: the need to reduce operational costs in their Sanitation Department, which was spending about $10 million annually. The push for cost savings was driven by the threat of privatization, which required the department to become competitive with private sector costs. The team proposed an automation scenario to Mayor John McCormac, which included reducing garbage service frequency and consolidating waste collection days. Additionally, the department had to incorporate new routes from Carteret Borough without hiring more employees or purchasing additional equipment. The existing routes were inefficient, with significant overlap and uneven distribution, leading to noise issues for residents.

Western Disposal serves approximately 35,000 residential and commercial customers in Boulder and Broomfield Counties in Colorado. The locally owned hauler, with over 40 years of experience, strives for best-in-class environmental sustainability in everything they do, whether it is through their carefully managed on-site operations or in their continual investments in energy-efficient technologies. When the management team decided to implement RouteSmart 19 years ago, they were beginning to automate manual routes to lower fuel and labor expenditures. The company also had a desire to reduce route planning time. Western Disposal needed a tool that could handle day-to-day challenges, as well as assist with bigger picture growth strategies like facilitating smooth business acquisitions and helping to roll out new services.

In 1989, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors mandated a goal of 75% waste diversion for all of San Francisco by the year 2010 and zero waste by 2020. Recology had to implement a radical plan to revamp its operations and convert its waste collection systems from a garbage and recycling bin-based system to a garbage, recycling, and organics waste system. Recology’s rallying cry is “waste zero,” and the company strives for a 100% recycling rate. This revolution in waste management meant a revolution within the company. Recology eliminated separate garbage and recycling vehicles and purchased dual collection vehicles that could handle garbage and recycling simultaneously, and purchased separate vehicles for organics waste. This dramatic change required management to overhaul their entire routing system.

Faced with budgetary pressures and aggressive performance goals, the City of Durham, North Carolina’s Solid Waste Department (SWD) was experiencing several operational and departmental issues. The residential waste collection program was losing money and being threatened with the elimination of positions. The previously outsourced recycling program was being brought in-house to better manage resources, budget, and customer service. The overall operating budget for SWD wasn’t increasing, due to fiscal pressures in other areas of the municipal budget. While 'do more with less' is a common story for many municipalities, Durham SWD wasn’t about to sit still and resign itself to ongoing inefficiency and ineffectiveness. The SWD team realized that it needed to do something quickly as pressure mounted to get organized—and do so in a manner that created smart, sustainable efficiencies throughout the department.

Sustainable waste management was a key priority within Renfrewshire due to the environmental impact of landfill disposal and vehicle emissions. Despite improvements in recycling rates, significant changes were needed to meet Renfrewshire’s SOA commitments and national Zero Waste Targets. A revised methodology for residual waste and recycling collection was devised to allow co-mingled collection of more recyclate material and reduce capacity to collect residual waste by moving from weekly to fortnightly kerbside collections. Council approval was given in January 2009, with significant support from Elected Members and the public. A project board was established, and a systematic project plan was devised using the Council’s Project Management Framework to manage the interdependencies of the four key workstreams: service rerouting, procurement, communications, and HR.

As anyone who’s driven the unique streets of the nation’s capital can attest to, Washington, D.C. can be a complex city to navigate. Traffic circles, lane restrictions and even direction changes based on time of day are all factors to consider. As the organization responsible for the District’s environmental services, solid waste management and parking enforcement, the D.C. Department of Public Works (DCDPW) faces these challenges every day – especially when it comes to keeping the streets clean. D.C.’s mechanical street sweeping program is one of the largest in the country for a city its size. However, the program was operating with 15-year-old routes that had been manually created and expanded over the years.

Under the European Union Waste Management Directive, by 2010 the UK was required to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill to 75% of that produced in 1995. Waste management is the third largest area of local government expenditure after construction and adult social care, prompting councils to improve the efficiency of waste collection services. Additionally, strong housing and population growth in areas like Northamptonshire has resulted in significant additional demand for services. The Northamptonshire Waste Partnership (NWP) aimed to address these challenges by optimizing waste collection routes and improving existing recycling services.

Colorado Springs Utilities, a locally owned non-profit utility, provides gas, electric, water, and wastewater services to approximately 193,000 customers in Colorado Springs, CO. The utility faced challenges in maintaining its hydrant preventative maintenance (PM) program, which tests 17,000 hydrants to ensure they are operational in emergencies. The program was suspended during drought years (2002-2006) and reinstated after a fire emergency in 2006. The utility needed to prioritize hydrants as critical or noncritical and rethink routing methods. Additionally, the Department of Transportation requires annual gas leak checks in service lines, and the utility's IT team replaced inefficient hand-drawn schedules with the Pipeline Compliance System (PCS). However, PCS often sent employees on inefficient routes, leading them to rely on clipboards and maps in the field.

With 6,100 employees, PSE&G’s territory covers 2,600 square miles. They maintain approximately 3.9 million meters — 1.8 million gas and 2.1 million electric meters — across nine meter reading district offices, and read the meters manually or electronically. Previously, meter readers sketched the massive routes on a map with a highlighter and made changes manually, but PSE&G wished to increase their overall efficiency by implementing technology, personnel and routing changes. They formulated three important routing goals surrounding its meter reading operations: Increase total meters read on a daily basis, consolidate routes for efficiency, and increase savings in meter reading division.

Serving nearly 300,000 customers in the greater Indianapolis area and surrounding counties, Veolia Water Indianapolis LLC, which had managed the Indianapolis Water (IW) Utility under contract since 2002, turned to RouteSmart in 2008 to manage a complete route redesign – the first major rerouting initiative in nearly 20 years. This redesign included overcoming several challenges, such as bimonthly readings for each half of the total service area, balancing billing cycles, matching routes to readers, and mapping over 23,000 customers who hadn’t been previously mapped. With a combination of fieldwork, software, and training, Indianapolis Water used RouteSmart to consolidate its 360 routes, gaining efficiency while minimizing customer impact. Fast-forward to today. In August 2011, Indianapolis Water merged with Citizens Energy Group (CEG), a utility with nearly 300,000 gas customers of its own and state-of-the-art technology, but routing challenges as well. To bring the two utilities together, the companies would have to combine gas and water meter-reading routes for over 600,000 customers without impacting the customer experience.

The Columbus Dispatch daily newspaper faced two challenges. First, the advertising department was requesting flexible and precise advertising zones. This would help attract smaller businesses that are focused on more narrow geographic markets, while providing larger advertisers flexible zones that many other newspapers were offering. The other challenge involved optimizing delivery routes for an independent contractor force that delivered about 1,600 routes each day. The routes needed to be contiguous and ZIP Code “pure” — with no route containing a partial ZIP Code area — to accommodate advertising zones. Plus, routes needed to be logical and efficient to help ensure fast, on-time delivery to subscribers even when new or substitute contractors were on the job.