London-based national wine wholesaler Liberty Wines is boosting its delivery service with an advanced route planning and scheduling system from Paragon Software Systems.
The software incorporates street level mapping for accurate routing and has special Olympics planning functionality to ensure that Liberty’s customers receive their daily orders on time during the games. The software will integrate with Liberty’s order processing system (Vintner) to speed the transport planning process. Liberty also anticipates that Paragon’s Single Depot software solution will enable better use of its delivery fleet resources.
“Paragon will enable us to plan more efficiently and effectively, making better use of our vehicle fleet and improving the service to our customers. The street level-mapping option we have selected takes account of road constraints such as one-way streets, no-entries and turn restrictions. This will help us to plan and manage our London deliveries with greater accuracy, where timed deliveries to leading restaurants are a key part of our service offering. The pre-programmed Olympic planning feature is extremely important as we are located on the Olympic Route Network and this will ensure we provide the best service during the games,” says Ben Marriott, Customer Services Manager at Liberty Wines.
Liberty Wines runs a fleet of large delivery vans for daily deliveries throughout London and once weekly deliveries to customers throughout the Home Counties. About 80% of fleet resources are long-term subcontractors, with some Liberty Wines’ own vehicles and drivers. The new route planning and scheduling software will maximise their loads and plan the delivery schedules and routes automatically, highlighting where there is spare capacity. The rest of the UK is covered by third party carriers, chosen for their high level of service.
“The majority of our drivers are long-term subcontractors who are paid a daily rate. When we plan manually we can only estimate start and finish of their runs, but with Paragon we’ll have visibility of their workloads,” says Ben Marriott. “We’ll also have the added benefit of knowing precisely which vehicle and driver is delivering each order without searching through paperwork; the information will be available to us at the push of a button.”
