This article is part of a series of interviews with Paragon customers working at the front lines of distribution.
Hagopian, founded in 1939, is a family-owned business recognized as the second largest specialist cleaner and restorer of carpet, upholstery and fabric panels in the US. A fleet of 25 vans handles around 200 cleaning jobs a day throughout the Detroit area. Hagopian began using Paragon routing software in 2003. We recently chatted with the company’s General Manager, Brian Hanna, and its Customer Care Manager, Tim DeTavernier, about how Hagopian leverages routing software to gain a competitive advantage.
Q: Why is efficient routing important to Hagopian?
A: A couple of reasons. One, more efficient routes mean less miles and less fuel expense. Two, it allows us to maximize truck and driver utilization. Our cleaning technicians, who drive from job to job, are able to spend less time behind the wheel and more time at the customer, which could mean an extra service call per day.
Q: What changes have you seen over the last five years in terms of customer demands?
A: People seem to value time more. They want more precise estimates of when we’ll arrive. If they take a day off work to get their carpets cleaned, chances are they are doing six or seven other errands throughout the day outside the home. They don’t want to be tied down.
Q: How has that impacted how you manage routes?
A: We use Paragon to capture the drive times and the times it takes to complete a service call along a given route. That allows us to meet the more condensed time windows customers are asking for. If they want to keep their afternoon free, for instance, they can request a morning appointment and we can agree to that up front. On the day of the appointment, we’ll call with a tighter arrival window.
Q: You mentioned service call times. Don’t those vary for every home and doesn’t that make it harder to predict ETAs – especially for later in the day?
A: It’s unpredictable, for sure. We base service call time on the number of rooms listed on the work order. With our years of experience, we know how much time we need to clean a rug in one room, so we can get pretty accurate with time estimates. Four rooms may take an hour and that gets recorded as a certain number of time units in Paragon for planning purposes.
Q: How does the software help you manage some of the unique aspects of your service business?
A: Our business is different than most private fleet operators in that our technicians work on commission, so we want to keep them all on the road – on the busiest and even the slowest days. In contrast, Paragon routes are designed to meet customer needs using the minimum number of trucks and drivers. We were able to adapt the system to focus less on reducing resources and more on balancing those resources across available routes.
Q: Can you assign technicians randomly or do customers ask for specific people?
A: We have technicians who have been visiting the same homes year after year so, yes, customers do ask for specific people. That request gets fed into Paragon from our Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP system and we are able to assign that service call to a specific technician. Paragon then builds an efficient route around this one stop using customers in the same area who have not requested someone specific.
Q: Are all vans dispatched from the same location?
A: We actually have two specialists whose job it is to treat problem stains. There is no need for them to come to the main office so they work out of their homes. Within Paragon, those homes are treated as separate depots and the system creates routes that start and end at the homes. Our Paragon support consultant helped us set up the relevant functionality in Paragon to manage this unique resource within our business.
Q: What’s the next step in your efforts to make your fleet as efficient as possible?
Our in-cab telematics system in all vans is Geotab. We’re aware that Paragon can now easily integrate with Geotab. The next step is to compare Paragon’s route plan with the actual route plan to identify discrepancies as they happen. That would give us a degree of visibility we don’t have right now.
Q: So, looking at planned versus actual is important to you.
A: Absolutely. We’ve invested to create the most efficient routes, so we want drivers to follow the routes to minimize operating costs. We also want to make sure drivers are not using company vehicles and company gas to run personal errands.
Q: Do you believe Paragon gives you a competitive advantage?
A: Yes. Most companies in our industry are smaller and plan routes manually. By automating vehicle routing, we’re able to minimize miles and fuel costs, so that makes us more efficient than most. But the real advantage is on the customer service side. Competitors can’t really tell customers a specific service time until the day of the appointment. With Paragon we can, and that gives the customer freedom to plan their day.
Q: What metrics are you using to measure the efficiency of fleet operations?
A: We monitor fuel spend closely. And we survey customers regularly to check our on-time arrival rate. But to be honest with you, we’ve been using Paragon for years and have come to trust it. Early on in our use of the software, we’d do occasional “man vs. machine” comparisons where we would plan a route manually and then enter that plan into Paragon and compare it with the software-generated route. We never won. The Paragon-generated route was always more efficient. After a while, we just stopped checking.
Q: What results have you achieved by automating the route planning process?
A: We’re reducing fleet mileage up to 10 percent a year, and customer satisfaction is up because we’re able to consistently meet arrival time promises. We’ve also been able to reduce staff. Pre-Paragon, we had three full-time dispatchers, and route planning was an all-day process for one of them. We were able to eliminate one of those positions. Between this and the fuel reduction, our ROI on the software investment was fast – within a year.
Q: As a long-time user of route optimization software, do you have any advice for other fleet operators?
A: Trust the software. For some routes, you may look at it on a map and it may seem, to the naked eye, completely inefficient. The temptation is to move jobs and shift routes around. But the system is factoring in highways, one-way roads and many other variables that you’re not thinking about when you look at dots on a map. When you start manipulating routes manually because you don’t like the way the system did it, you’ll almost certainly be adding extra time and miles. Believe me, we’ve done it. Save yourself the time.
