Paragon’s routing and scheduling solution has been selected by Bibby Distribution, the UK’s leading independent logistics company, for strategic planning use throughout its business.
Bibby Distribution currently operates more than 1,000 vehicles out of 60 operating centres employing over 2,500 staff and sought to standardise strategic transport planning within its business development team, responsible for designing transport solutions for current and prospective customers.
“We needed a solution which was both totally reliable and easy to use,” confirms Martin O’Reilly, general manager business development. “Following a competitive selection process, we chose Paragon as offering a proven robust solution, underpinned by the company’s unmatched strategic planning experience.
“Once we saw the quality of results during the testing phase, it rapidly became obvious that Paragon was the ideal choice to meet our demanding requirements.”
Rapid turnaround
Paragon was installed in August and is used to improve the delivery of a wide range of business development activities, including modelling new distribution operations, calculating resource requirements and transport costs and costing alternative strategies.
The benefits have been both immediate and impressive. “Specific functionality, such as Paragon’s Multi-Period Planner capability, has proved extremely useful in enabling us to plan over longer timescales,” says O’Reilly.
“More broadly, however, the ability to respond quickly to clients and prospects is paramount in the logistics market,” he believes, “and here, Paragon not only enables us to input data and run analyses faster but, critically, also gives us complete confidence in the output.”
Bibby Distribution already had existing positive experience of Paragon within its operations division. “This makes transition from the bidding process to live service delivery much easier when the company is successful in pitching for new business,” says Charles Nockold, marketing and business development director, Paragon.
“Because they are using the same software to plan daily operations, Bibby Distribution can be confident that, not only are quotes based on the most tightly-optimised transport schedules available, but also that such schedules are practical and deliverable.”
Proactive support
O’Reilly has been especially impressed with the level of support provided by Paragon. “The implementation and training have been excellent, enabling us to be up and running quickly and successfully,” he confirms.
“The Paragon team clearly understands our business and takes a proactive and pragmatic approach to customer service. Like us, it is much more than about ‘just getting the job done’: they clearly enjoy rising to any challenge and work hard to find the right solution.
“The result is that we have full confidence in the resilience of the Paragon software, the quality of the transport schedules it generates and the commitment and expertise of the back-up – a perfect combination.”
