Since 1984, BC Sands has been a leading landscaping and building material supplier in metro Sydney.
Offering both delivery and pick-up services, BC Sands operates out of two yards located in Taren Point and Brookvale. Their fleet of 30+ vehicles deliver bulk landscaping and building supplies such as sand, cement and bricks to customers, completing over 1,100 deliveries weekly.
The Challenge
To facilitate successful customer last-mile delivery experiences, BC Sands identified many variables needing management including a need to increase capacity within their existing fleet.
Managing deliveries around Sydney’s complex road networks and traffic congestion was integral to improving BC Sand’s supply chain performance, as these could drastically affect customer time delivery windows and subsequently customer satisfaction.
Another key focus was to enable a platform facilitating open communication for staff, ensuring visibility, and supporting the sharing of plans and information, to reduce errors and their subsequent cost blowouts.
"The building and landscaping industry is competitive and being able to reliably deliver during the same day that customers order is critical to attracting and keeping them."
Mark Parsons, Managing Director, BC Sands
The Solution
BC Sands worked with Bestrane to implement Route Planner which combines planning, execution and reporting to provide route optimisation with fully integrated route tracking and execution via mobile devices.
Route Planner is an enterprise route optimisation and execution application that enables organisations to plan routes more efficiently, reduce delivery time windows, address exceptions on the road and respond to customer changes in real time.
This route tracking and execution enables drivers with a wireless connection to manage and view route information from Route Planner, provides logistics managers visibility as to the status of deliveries and drivers, and enables tracking of planned vs. actual performance in real time.
Whilst conducting their routes, the actions of the driver triggers status updates that are sent directly to the customer’s contact number. These include notification of ‘Order Confirmation’, ‘Order Reminder’ and ‘En Route’ deliveries. Once deliveries are ‘Completed’ by drivers, POD documents are automatically sent through to customers.
The Results
As a result of deploying Route Planner, the Transport Allocator and Customer Service roles have been merged into a single Customer Service Planner role, which assigns jobs to routes, allowing BC Sands to provide real time feedback to customers about delivery windows and SMS confirmation throughout the delivery process.
Customers can now buy BC Sands products and schedule a delivery via their website. BC Sands provides a great service to customers who realise at 2am that they need a tonne of turf delivered at 7am the next morning. Through the Reservations functionality, customers are presented with available delivery options, with premium time windows attracting a premium cost. This approach has two benefits, as a new revenue source and as a mechanism to balance demand over the day.
Yard-staff are notified of inbound vehicles so that their orders can be fulfilled ‘just in time’ for vehicle arrival which in turn has also increased the number of same-day sales. Continuous route optimisation, beginning immediately after an order is placed, has contributed to a 26% increase in deliveries per driver hour, and an 18% reduction in fuel usage per delivery.
“We’ve lowered our distribution costs by getting more capacity out of our fleet, improving the consistency of our customer experience, having fewer returned loads and better managing a huge array of products in vehicles with different dimensions and capabilities."
Mark Parsons, Managing Director, BC Sands
