Clover
This year (2006) Clover decided to integrate two of its Gauteng depots - Mayfair and City Deep. The project was called ‘Save the Whale’. Previously, Mayfair only supplied fresh products to customers while City Deep also delivered concentrated products (eg: cheese) to its database of customers. Some 36 vehicles from the Mayfair operation were moved over to City Deep when the Mayfair branch closed down, to help cope with the increase in deliveries.
OPSI were asked to do a study to help integrate the routes as certain customers were being serviced twice on a single day (once for fresh and once for concentrated product) or more frequently than their service level agreement stipulated. These customers could not simply be moved across to existing City Deep routes as the present routes could not cope with the increased capacity. New routes had to be designed to incorporate existing customers and those new to the City Deep operation.
Clover had an additional requirement that made the problem much more complicated: customers in a particular delivery group on one day had to remain in that delivery group for all other days on which they were serviced. This constraint meant that if customer A was in a delivery group with customers B, C, D, E, F and G on Monday for example, and if customer A required a delivery on Wednesday, it could only be grouped with those customers in its existing delivery group. This additional constraint made the study and allocation of nominated delivery days to customers more restrictive. In addition, OPSI was required to design a set of routes which would ensure that fleet utilization was approximately level over the week while ensuring that each customers' nominated delivery days did not violate any rules in place, for example: customers needing 2 deliveries per week could not be serviced on consecutive days.
The newly designed routes were implemented in a trial run in the second week of May this year and it is expected that the full integration will be complete by 7th June. The expected saving is roughly 20 vehicles per day - a reduction of just over 15%. The sleep-out routes have also been more efficiently designed. Trucks now leave earlier to meet the earliest customer’s delivery window and fewer sleep outs are required which is beneficial to Clover in terms of security and more preferable to the drivers. Vehicle and time utilization is higher on most routes and a maximum number of stops per route has also been implemented to make routes more manageable and ensure drivers are not on the road for extended periods of time.
Recommendations were also made with regard to the current fleet after a fleet sizing exercise, looking at a month’s sales data, had been completed. OPSI worked closely with a Clover representative at each step of the process to ensure an implementable and accurate result. A lot of time was spent ensuring the correctness of customer details; geo-coding, delivery windows, waiting times etc.
The City Deep depot now delivers approximately 550 tons of dairy produce daily (including Saturdays which are half days) and utilizes 110 trucks per day to do this. They deliver to areas as far out as Witbank and Vereeniging and use agents to do deliveries in areas regarded as unsafe for their staff and vehicles.
FLO is currently being implemented in all of Clover’s depots as part of a countrywide roll-out. The City Deep and Mayfair project seems to be saving the whale!
