Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/388078
66 COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | OCTOBER 2014 COVER STORY: E-COMMERCE Once identified, the company's planning systems create optimal delivery routes that minimize mileage, meet appointment schedules and use the right equipment, such as trailers with liftgates. About 22 percent of SEFL's total deliveries have appointment times, but for residential de- liveries, about 93 percent have appointments – by design. Without residential delivery appointments, SEFL was bringing about half of the shipments back to its terminals because the receivers weren't at home when its trucks arrived. Now, residential deliver- ies automatically go to an appointment queue for customer service clerks to make calls. SEFL currently is experimenting with a software system that uses "artificial in- telligence" to automate the appointment scheduling process. The software will call customers and have a "conversation" with them to set delivery appointments and verify shipping details. During the delivery process, SEFL provides its customers and consignees a delivery time that is accurate to within an hour. The information can be sent to the interested parties through EDI, its website or email notification. A number of cloud-based technologies can be added to help make fleet opera- tions in many industries more flexible and nimble to capitalize on e-commerce opportunities. Telogis' Software-as-a-Service location intelligence platform has a number of integrated components, including strate- gic and dynamic route planning, mobile apps for hours of service and other driver compliance requirements, commercial navigation and telematics. The online grocery industry currently represents 2 percent of the $650 billion spent annually in domestic grocery spending and is expected to increase to 10 to 17 percent of the total market by 2023. Door to Door Organics – which provides local, natural and organic food to custom- ers in 11 markets and 30 cities – says it has experienced double-digit growth since 2006 and has made more than 1.7 million deliveries to date. "With this growth, we have managed our delivery costs by creating market density by concentrating our available delivery days by area," says Gary Ashurst, vice president of systems engineering. "Delivery is available in our metro areas every day of operation, and we also offer our service to customers hundreds of miles away and charge no delivery fee." The company, which projects having more than 35,000 active customers by yearend, uses the Telogis platform to optimize route planning. "Our talented staff and operating software constantly optimize delivery routes to accommodate growth and seasonal changes in demand," Ashurst says. "Our customers prefer the predictability of regular delivery times, and our drivers are very familiar with the customer's location, which increases our efficiency." Ashurst says Telogis' route planning software has reduced Door to Door's logistical complexities and improved its cost profile per delivery. Previously, the company's logistics team would build routes from scratch every day, and then manually overhaul those routes until they were similar to previous routes and included all new customers. "Now our software eliminates the time spent on manually manipulating delivery routes, and we have the option of easily adding new customers," Ashurst says. "While we have encountered double-digit growth over last year at this time, our logistics specialist labor hours are now down by over 11 percent in the same period." The Telogis system gathers GPS data di- rectly from Door to Door drivers' phones to update location and route progres- sion, which helps the grocer plan routes and provide consistent real-time data to customers. ELECTRONIC TRANSACTIONS In e-commerce, buyers expect to have instant information on shipping costs, order status and delivery times. CrossCountry Freight Solutions, a 210-truck fleet based in Bismarck, N.D., offers this information to its customers through a website that links the many different components of an electronic delivery system. The main benefits for the company implement- ing this electronic platform were cost Lexington, S.C.-based less-than-truckload company Southeastern Freight Lines created a software program that automatically identifies pallet-size pickups going to private residences. Using Telogis' Software-as-a-Service platform, fleets can calculate a dynamic real-time estimated time of arrival for each scheduled delivery on a route.