Spicers says "thanks a million"

04 June 2007, 5:44pm

£1 million to the good and 12 years on, Spicers gains more from TruckStops

Since introducing the TruckStops routing and scheduling system from MapMechanics over twelve years ago, office products wholesaler Spicers (www.spicers.net) has saved “in excess of one million pounds” in its transport and logistics activities.

So says Richard Slade, logistics manager in the company’s logistics management team, who was involved in the purchase of the original TruckStops licence.

“Since then it’s become an indispensable tool for us,” he says. “We’ve used it for everything from network planning to fleet rationalisation. We’ve even used it to model travel to work by our own staff.”

He pays tribute to the support he’s had from MapMechanics over the years. “We haven’t often needed to call on their resources, but on the rare occasions when we’ve done so, they’ve always given us outstanding service.”

In a major network review, TruckStops helped reveal an opportunity to close one of the company’s regional distribution centres at Nottingham. “TruckStops showed that we could cover the same work load from other bases, but at significantly lower cost,” Richard Slade explains.

Now the company is reaping yet more benefits from TruckStops by harnessing the feedback from a new real-time proof of delivery system. Delivery vehicles have been equipped with handheld terminals so that drivers can transmit proof of delivery details back to base in real time via GPRS wireless network.

“This has given us an unprecedented amount of accurate delivery data,” Richard Slade explains, “which makes it much easier for us to check planned against actual performance.” Among the benefits, he says, this means the company can verify TruckStops delivery schedules, ensuring that they are achievable.

Spicers is Britain’s biggest office equipment wholesaler, supplying everything from paperclips and stationery to furniture. It operates from a central warehouse outside Cambridge and a network of eight regional distribution centres at Birmingham, Belfast, Bristol, Glasgow, London (three sites) and Manchester. Goods are trunked to these sites from Cambridge on Spicers’ trunking fleet, predominantly using double-deck trailers, and are then delivered to wholesaler and retailer customers by a fleet of 110 delivery vehicles. The transport delivery operations are provided by a mix of in-house and third party-contractors.

When Spicers introduced TruckStops it was only the second UK user to adopt it. MapMechanics then traded under its registered name, Kingswood Ltd, and operated from a base at Kingswood Road in west London. In recent years it has adopted MapMechanics branding and the URL www.mapmechanics.com to reflect its business focus more closely.

Right from the start, Spicers used TruckStops on a strategic basis, rather than for scheduling loads dynamically from day to day. “I realise many other businesses now use TruckStops very effectively to plan day-to-day deliveries,” Richard Slade acknowledges, “but when we adopted it computers were slower and integration was more of a challenge. We took a pragmatic view; we wanted quick results.”

By using TruckStops to re-plan its fixed delivery routes, Richard Slade says he succeeded in achieving the desired benefits. “We made savings within the first six weeks by cutting our fleet requirement by two vehicles.”

Since then Spicers has continued to use TruckStops on an ongoing basis to check, monitor and reassess its delivery strategy. “We operate in a highly competitive environment,” Richard Slade says. “Our customers expect deliveries within very tight time windows – as little as fifteen minutes – and some of them require up to three deliveries a day. So there’s a constant need to re-examine our routes, to squeeze more efficiency from them, and to take account of new operational requirements.”

The pragmatic approach has been maintained.
“We don’t insist that local managers and drivers slavishly accept every schedule proposed by TruckStops, but we tell them that if they want to vary anything, they have to do it with the resources TruckStops proposes.” He adds: “We know from experience that TruckStops will never be far out, but this way we avoid being over-prescriptive.”

He says TruckStops has proved ideal over the years for “what-if” modelling. “For instance, we might look at deliveries from three existing depots. TruckStops allows us to consider vehicles at all three bases as a single pool, and can show us opportunities to transfer customers between depots, to reduce the fleet, reduce operating miles or to dispense with a depot altogether.”

TruckStops has also proved its worth on exercises that have more of a “blue-sky” quality. “For example, not long ago we gathered all the delivery times and details for five depots and ran them through TruckStops, paying particular attention to the spend per customer. This helped us determine which customers could be served more economically by carrier than with our own vehicles.”

He adds: “It also highlighted remoter areas where it might be worth reconsidering whether we should be running our own vehicles at all.”

Other applications for TruckStops have included analysis of transhipment opportunities, and recalculation of routes where noise might be a factor. “We do a lot of night-time deliveries, sometimes to unstaffed premises, and often have to take noise into account.”

So powerful has the influence of TruckStops become at Spicers that, unusually, the way the company runs its picking operation differs from established logistics practice. “Rather than pick product and then ask TruckStops how to schedule the deliveries,” Richard Slade says, “we work out the optimal delivery schedule and then arrange the picking to fit it. I don’t know why more operators don’t take this approach.”

He admits that it is not always possible to drive all picking on this basis, “but if we can, we do, and we find it works very well for us.”

Sometimes Spicers even uses TruckStops to help its customers remodel their own delivery operations. Many retailers run in-house delivery fleets, and Spicers sometimes agrees to input their delivery data into TruckStops and assess the opportunities for savings.

“The solution isn’t always obvious,” Richard Slade says. “With one company, we found they were running one delivery vehicle miles off its local route to serve a single customer. We question the value, but the explanation was that it was a highly prestigious company, and worth the extra expense. So our recommendation was for the retailer to seek other customers on the delivery corridor to offset the added cost of serving this one.”

The original version of TruckStops purchased from MapMechanics by Spicers was a DOS-based application. Nowadays the company uses the latest graphically-based TruckStops Professional version, which runs as a native Windows application, along with GeoConcept mapping.

www.mapmechanics.com

Maria Lotycka, MapMechanics, London

email: maria.lotycka@mapmechanics.com