Automating Route Planning: A Case Study of Colorado Boxed Beef Company
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Transportation Management Systems (TMS)
- Networks & Connectivity - 5G
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
- Transportation
Applicable Functions
- Facility Management
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Last Mile Delivery
- Vehicle Telematics
Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
CBBC serves a wide variety of customers that operate a diverse range of businesses. Their customers include supermarkets, restaurants, cruise companies, military bases, and schools. The company's branded product lines include High River Angus beef and Diamond Reef seafood. Despite the diversity in their operations, most customers have similar expectations from CBBC. They expect timely deliveries, good service, and drivers who understand the product and are respectful to customers. They also appreciate proactive communication about delivery times and real-time tracking of delivery vehicles.
The Challenge
Colorado Boxed Beef Company (CBBC), a major distributor of refrigerated and frozen food products, was facing challenges in managing its delivery operations. The company was dealing with over 6,000 deliveries per week, using approximately 180 tractors and 220 drivers. The primary challenge was handling one-off requests from the sales department or customers for uniquely timed deliveries for the following day. These requests often required changes to the existing route plan to meet a very small time window. The company was also dealing with the evolving customer demands in the food industry, where customers expected products to be delivered in the shortest time after ordering, with better rates. They also demanded more frequent, proactive communication about delivery times. The company was struggling to meet these demands with its manual approach to delivery operations.
The Solution
CBBC implemented Paragon from Aptean's route planning software across its operations in July 2018 to increase efficiency. The software was later connected with CBBC’s telematics system, allowing real-time tracking of delivery vehicles across the network. This technology enabled the company to automate its delivery operations, drastically changing the way it worked. The automated route planning system allowed the company to work more efficiently with drivers, tractors, trailers, and all its resources. The company also introduced automated route execution software, which enabled them to track where the driver is and when they’ll arrive. This allowed the company to send out a message via email or other formats to let customers know when a delivery will arrive, ensuring the customer’s location can be staffed properly.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
Airport SCADA Systems Improve Service Levels
Modern airports are one of the busiest environments on Earth and rely on process automation equipment to ensure service operators achieve their KPIs. Increasingly airport SCADA systems are being used to control all aspects of the operation and associated facilities. This is because unplanned system downtime can cost dearly, both in terms of reduced revenues and the associated loss of customer satisfaction due to inevitable travel inconvenience and disruption.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
IoT-based Fleet Intelligence Innovation
Speed to market is precious for DRVR, a rapidly growing start-up company. With a business model dependent on reliable mobile data, managers were spending their lives trying to negotiate data roaming deals with mobile network operators in different countries. And, even then, service quality was a constant concern.
Case Study
Digitize Railway with Deutsche Bahn
To reduce maintenance costs and delay-causing failures for Deutsche Bahn. They need manual measurements by a position measurement system based on custom-made MEMS sensor clusters, which allow autonomous and continuous monitoring with wireless data transmission and long battery. They were looking for data pre-processing solution in the sensor and machine learning algorithms in the cloud so as to detect critical wear.
Case Study
Cold Chain Transportation and Refrigerated Fleet Management System
1) Create a digital connected transportation solution to retrofit cold chain trailers with real-time tracking and controls. 2) Prevent multi-million dollar losses due to theft or spoilage. 3) Deliver a digital chain-of-custody solution for door to door load monitoring and security. 4) Provide a trusted multi-fleet solution in a single application with granular data and access controls.
