Glanbia plc, one of Ireland’s largest food companies and supplier of the market-leading brands Yoplait, Avonmore and Kilmeaden, has awarded Paragon Software Systems a contract to supply a high-tech computerised distribution planning system. The Paragon Multi Depot routing and scheduling system will fully automate and optimise route planning and resources for delivering chilled food products throughout the Republic of Ireland.
The investment in Paragon routing software highlights Glanbia’s commitment to customer service excellence and is forecasting a rapid return on investment of less than six months for the system.
Glanbia has started to use the system to model, review and improve fixed routes for making more than 2,600 deliveries a week to a wide range of customers. These include the majority of supermarkets and convenience stores serving Ireland’s 26 counties. Replacing manual planning, the new routing software will be at the heart of Glanbia’s transport strategy for improving productivity of its entire fleet of chilled food delivery vehicles, drivers and depots.
“Paragon’s routing software will ensure that we optimise our productivity and vehicle, driver, and fuel costs,” says John Mee, Supply Chain Manager, Glanbia. “This will also benefit our customers as we shall be able to provide more optimal deliveries and increase our levels of service. We are confident that our customers will see a difference.”
Glanbia has a number of future developments in the pipeline for the system, which will further enhance its functionality.
“Paragon is developing further interfaces for its Route Execution software to enable us to use satellite vehicle tracking. We aim to implement this later this year. This will allow us to make highly accurate real-time assessments of our delivery performance. We are also looking forward to using the system for modelling routes for our milk business later this year,” adds John Mee.
Glanbia plc is an international cheese and nutritional ingredients group, headquartered in Kilkenny, Ireland. The Group has 4,300 employees in seven countries and sales offices in a further five. International operations include Food Ingredients & Nutritionals, while Irish operations incorporate Consumer Foods and Agribusiness & Property. The Group has three strategic joint ventures, which are based in the UK, USA and Nigeria.
