Food Delivery Logistics: Case Study
Food delivery logistics are critical in successfully planning getting food direct to people's houses or businesses. Here we look at a case study on Brady Family Ham.
Brady Family Ham
The tradition of Brady Family Ham in Ireland goes back over 40 years. In that time, they’ve become synonymous with quality products and won countless awards for their taste and flavor.
In recent years, they had offered a popular home delivery service in the run-up to the holiday season. This allowed customers across Ireland to order their hams and turkeys for the traditional Christmas Dinner. But 2020 was no ordinary year, and with unprecedented demand, they needed help to ensure the success of the service.
What we will take a look at in this case study:
The Challenges
In 2020, Irish consumers turned to online shopping and home-delivery services like never before. In fact, two in five people say they began shopping online for the first time at the start of the pandemic. As a result, Brady Family Ham saw online orders for their Christmas Hams and Turkeys reach much greater numbers than that of the two years previous that they had also offered the service.
The logistics of delivering chilled, perishable food products had its own unique set of challenges. This year, Brady Family preferred to take control of deliveries themselves to ensure the best customer experience
To guarantee successful deliveries to all customer, excellent customer experience, and to ensure their staff were equipped for the task at hand, a solution was needed that would allow them to manage the entire distribution project in an efficient and stress-free way.
When Brady Family Ham approached us, we quickly set about establishing how they would organize and execute this direct-to-consumer operation in a short timeframe.
The Solution
Route planning from excel file
Before onboarding with SmartRoutes, Brady Family Ham had collected all of their customers orders and associated details in a spreadsheet:
Within the Desktop Route Planner, they were able to simply upload this file, and automate the creation of routes without having to input the information associated with each order.
In doing so, it meant that all of the customer-generated information was attached to each order for both the administrator and the driver. This saved hours in manually uploading stops and inputting the relevant order details.
Territory management and route optimization
As this was a season rather than year-round venture, Brady Family Ham needed to hire a fleet of temperature controlled vans and additional drivers.
SmartRoutes Zoning feature allowed them to create zones specific to each driver's knowledge of a particular area, and this, in turn, ensured that their delivery routes were all assigned within these borders. This was a feature that allowed them to capitalize on the existing employee experience.
Dispatch & Driver Notes
The service offered individual turkeys and hams, as well as a combination package to the customers. At the point of order on Brady Family Ham online store, customers selected which offer they wanted and made their payment.
When uploading the customers’ data through the CSV/Excel file, this information was included with a reference number for each delivery. By including this information in the spreadsheet, meant that when routes were sent to Drivers SmartRoutes Mobile App, each delivery had the dispatch note which included the order type and the associated reference number. This ensured that the correct products were successfully delivered to each customer.
Similarly, the ability for drivers to record photo proof-of-delivery and their own driver notes on deliveries, meant that live data on orders was relayed directly to the Desktop Route Planner, where the admin team instantly could resolve any issues or reschedule deliveries.
The perishable nature of the goods meant that all deliveries needed to be delivered directly to the customer. The ability to call customers directly from the Driver Mobile App also saved drivers time and kept the rate of undeliverable stops to a minimum.
Customer Delivery Notifications
To further guarantee successful deliveries, SmartRoutes gave Brady Family Ham the ability to send customers advanced notice of delivery with planned ETA’s. By giving customers notice of the delivery time a day in advance, it allowed them to make themselves available to take delivery or arrange an alternative time that suited both parties.
Live Vehicle Tracking & Real-Time ETA’s
As mentioned, Brady Family Ham had hired a fleet of vans to complete the Christmas delivery project. This meant that they would not have the benefit of pre-installed GPS trackers.
However, the SmartRoutes Driver App is equipped with in-built GPS tracking which gives a live, accurate feed of all vehicle locations to the Live Routes Feed on the Desktop Route Planner.
This meant that the project administrator had full oversight of live routes and the Customer Support Team was able to handle customer queries around ETA’s instantly without having to contact drivers, leading to distractions and delays.
The Outcome
Although Brady Family Ham had experience in wholesale B2B deliveries, this was their first time undertaking direct-to-consumer deliveries themselves.
Over the course of the project, SmartRoutes Delivery Route Planner helped to complete a significant volume of nationwide deliveries with multiple drivers and vehicles.
The measure of a successful project was successful deliveries, easy planning and project management, and entirely positive feedback from customers and drivers.
The Results
To read more case studies you can check them out on our Customer Stories page. If you would like to know more about our services, you can book a demo with a member of our team for a personalized walkthrough of the platform.
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Caroline Hassett
Brendan Tobin
