Proven in the field

You can't keep New York City waiting...especially for dinner.

THE BUSINESS
Jimmy Kostro has a unique business challenge. His company, Meal Plan Delivery, delivers dinner for up to 1000 hungry New Yorkers in the highly congested greater New York City area three times per week.  Each Meal Plan Delivery driver has only 4 hours to complete up to 30 deliveries.  Each delivery has its’ own very narrow and specific delivery time window.  If the meal deliveries are late, there are no second chances - these are hungry New Yorkers we are talking about, after all.

THE PROBLEM
Jimmy’s process to route his deliveries and drivers was a complex system. It consisted of separate
applications to manage the incoming order and optimize each driver's route.  Dispatchers would spend 2-3 man hours per delivery day to transfer data from one application to the other, review “optimized” routes, and manually make any needed adjustments for specific delivery schedules.  
Not surprisingly, the inefficient process and system wasn’t achieving the results Jimmy needed.

“We tried every optimization software we could find; Route Savvy, Ontime 360, MapPoint,
Maptitude-- you name it.  None of these applications could deal with the rigorous scheduling demands of our business.  We knew there had to be a better way.”   

The need to find that “better way” became critical when Meal Plan Delivery’s customer base doubled overnight with the signing of a new partner.  The ensuing chaos resulted in too many late deliveries and inefficient routes.   “I needed a robust, dynamic routing solution, and I needed it right away!”

THE SOLUTION
Jimmy turned to his dispatch software provider, Key Software Systems, who had recently announced a partnership with Greenlight to integrate Greenlight’s SmartRoute route optimization service into Key Software Solutions Xcelerator dispatch application.

Jimmy and the Greenlight team moved quickly to onboard SmartRoute’s route optimization service into Meal Plan Delivery’s Xcelerator dispatch platform for his New York deliveries.  Completely integrated, there was no longer any need to manage cumbersome file transfers between applications.   Built specifically for Last Mile Delivery customers, SmartRoute accounted for the specific and demanding stop delivery schedules along with driver capacity, traffic patterns, driver schedules, and various starting location. 

The result according to Jimmy:  

Jimmy continues
“The biggest challenge we had early on was to get drivers to actually follow the SmartRoute optimized delivery sequences.  Some of the drivers initially thought they could outperform the optimized route by delivering orders out of sequence.  For instance, they made deliveries out of sequence to nearby stops  early on their route.  It intuitively made sense when looking at a map as the location was close by.  But in our business, every minute counts and these deviations had a devastating ripple effect down the line, resulting in late delivery windows.  After the first week, we drilled it into the drivers that they had to follow the optimized sequence, no exceptions.  When they followed the routes, the magic happened-- efficiency went way up and late deliveries dropped! ” .  With the New York region stabilized, Jimmy is now deploying SmartRoute for Meal Plan Delivery in his other regions in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Florida.