Route Optimization For The Win
Do you feel that your sales fleet can attain better results? Better yet, can they achieve higher revenues without incurring any additional cost and only by optimising their current activities? Read on.
1. Background
It’s incredible to think that the origins of Soy Sauce date back more than 2500 years. Our client owns and operates a Soy Sauce manufacturing plant with a fleet of 11 trucks that work on a ‘Van-Sales’ model. In this model, each vehicle acts as a distributor and targets both selling to existing clients, and building a new customer base.
For such a business, the key to growth and sustainability is to achieve higher customer satisfaction through speedy and effective route management without increasing costs. It’s critical to reduce the operating costs per route to increase profitability.
2. The Problem
Over the last six months, our client noticed a decreasing trend in the overall sales revenue. The new customer acquisition rate had dropped drastically, and the salesmen were reluctant to open new accounts stating that they needed to spend time on retaining the existing customer base. Our client believed that there had to be a way to optimise the time spent on the road, but lacked access to essential data to make such an assessment. This was when they reached out to the GPS-Fleet team in search of an effective solution.
3. Our Solution
We installed our GPS tracking devices on all 11 trucks and provided the business owner with easy access to:
- Route maps to understand where the fleet operated
- Detailed trip records including time spent in each area
- Optimised route recommendations
This provided the business owners with complete visibility into the fleet movements, and they could use this information to test their hypothesis.
Table 1: Highlighting the frequency of fleet movements in an area. Green refers to frequent movement, Orange refers to occasional movement, and Red refers to rare movement. Some of the top areas services by the sales fleet indicate an overlap that can be optimised.
4. Results
We discovered significant inconsistencies; the routes in a specific area were being covered by multiple salesmen, resulting in wasted effort. As a result of our intervention, the business owner was able to drive the following results:
Route optimisation that leads to an overall increase in sales and efficiency in planning.
- Route optimisation led to Increase in sales revenue per Ringgit spent on fuel cost.
- Rerouting sales associates to approach new customers led to Increased sales from new accounts while maintaining revenue from existing clients.
- Detailed trip records matched with sales revenue, provided insights to compare the performance of different sales associates.
- Calculated a new performance metric: Sales Volume per hour spent by the salesmen in an area. Analyzing this data every month revealed whether the salesmen spent their time productively while operating in a particular area.
Know More
This was just one example of how our clients have reaped the benefits of connectivity, productivity and profitability. Each business is different, and we tailor our services to suit your unique needs. Try it yourself, to experience an exceptional service that you have never encountered before. Contact us to know more about running an experiment to test the feasibility of our technology to drive real economic value for your business.
