The Client
Deanta Doors is one of the UK’s leading manufacturers and distributors of internal decorative and fire doors to the UK homebuilding and Builders Merchant markets. Based in the East of England, Deanta delivers nationally across the UK using its own fleet of vehicles as well as carrier distribution.
The business has grown significantly over the past decade to a point where the company delivers from its manufacturing base warehouse as well as satellite distribution points, where customer orders are cross docked onto local delivery vehicles.
The Challenge
The business has an issue that many in its sector do; they distribute awkward shaped product that is highly challenging to plan onto a vehicle efficiently and effectively. This leads to a significant manual process where their transport planning team had to spend a significant amount of time daily creating manual load plans that reflected the many varied needs of how to load product in a safe and delivery-friendly way.
The client needed a solution to their load planning constraints to enable them to be able to plan vehicles in a quick and visually clear way that applied their business rule-set to ensure high quality product handling and delivery, with ease of off-loading at point of delivery.
They had considered approaches to automate this process previously, but had found that the challenges they faced in designing a (spreadsheet-based) system were just too many to enable them to achieve this within the skill-sets and more importantly, the time availability of their current team.
As part of a wider transportation review, the client engaged ASCALi to build on its Load Planner application to provide for a new, accurate and quick method of designing loads that gave them what they need.
The Approach
The team from ASCALi set about defining the requirements to create a process that would provide what Deanta needed. This was not simply about providing a software application that would do a job. It was about developing a wider business process that streamlines all their activity and let them focus their attention onto other challenging areas of managing a growing delivery fleet.
This is where the consulting team from ASCALi uses our software applications to support our provision of expert consulting services, rather than simply handing over an application. The way the application was to be used and when it should be used was just as big a question versus what the functionality of the application did. By following this approach, the consulting team were able to broaden the horizon of the project and strengthen the ongoing process that supported multi depot operations from their head office base.
The consulting team engineered the end solution to meet the many varied product and customer challenges that faced the client when delivering to industrial and consumer locations.
The Outcome
The ASCALi team’s expertise, and the Load Planner application enabled the client to make a real step-change in managing its loading function. Some of the benefits delivered included:
- A highly accelerated daily load planning timescale, from 8 hours+ load planning a day, to less than 1 hour.
- A process that automatically factored in the placement of ugly and over-sized items onto the vehicle to ensure that like for like items were co-located, maximising use of vehicle capacity.
- Ability to set rules for maximum stacking heights for different types of delivery and customer set depending on what has to happen at point of delivery.
- Options to clearly specify fragile product that must be on the top of assembled orders to protect the product.
- The ability to select specific customer orders to be located in specific parts of the vehicle, for example, load a particular customer on the vehicle’s near side to enable safe off-load and point of delivery.
- Solutions to manage and re-plan orders that could not be located within the vehicle capacity constraints.
- Set up to handle a very broad mix of vehicle types from 7.5t vans, right up to 44t articulated double deckers.
- Produce a vehicle loading plan that is used by loaders that provides a highly accurate representation of how the load should be made up precisely on the vehicle.
- Use the load planning process to identify opportunities to open up vehicle capacity to add further drops to a vehicle that may otherwise have been considered full when considering the standard vehicle fill metrics used in transport planning
These and many other benefits added significant value to the client’s operating solution, leading to a safer, more efficient and clearly controlled vehicle loading process.
Overall the range of benefits available to the client from this project have been significant and have been delivered by the team at ASCALi within budget and beyond initial expectations.
You can read more about our ASCALi Load Planner Application here. If you would like to talk to us to understand how our ability to combine practical expertise with genuine innovation, or to make an appointment for a free consultation, please contact us here.