Video: Gateway Services Balances Routes with Strategic Planning

The Challenge: Company Growth Resulted in Route Inefficiencies

As Gateway Services began to expand its services throughout the US and Canada, they acquired numerous companies offering similar aftercare services, each with their own pre-established routes in place. This growth created significant route overlap, leading to inefficiencies (running more routes, miles and drive time than required) and gaps in coverage, with some geographic areas struggling to meet demand, while others were under capacity.

In addition to this, they were unable to find a singular routing platform that was able to cater to all their needs or meet their capacity. This meant that they were using two or three different platforms at any given time, incurring extra costs and requiring them to manually transfer data from one platform to another on a regular basis. This time-consuming process opened the door for considerable human and computer error. It became clear that as they expanded their services, they needed a platform that could streamline and automate the complicated process of strategic route planning decisions.

The Solution: Advanced Route Planning Increases Efficiency and Transforms Operations

With Descartes’ strategic route planning solution, Gateway Services consolidated multiple disparate routing systems and processes, many of which were manual, complicated and highly time-consuming into a single platform. This eliminated inefficiencies, improved productivity, reduced human errors, and produced far superior routing results.

Previously, drivers experienced significant route overlap, leading to excessive drive times and inefficient resource allocation. Descartes’ solution enabled Gateway Services to analyze and optimize these routes, ensuring balanced workloads and improved service coverage.

“One thing that no other routing software we looked at could meet was our business rules. Descartes WinRoute™ handled that from the start. We can balance time, we can balance weight while still following all of our rules, and then also balance any overlap so we don't have drivers passing over each other.”
Randy Robinson, Operational Excellence Specialist, Gateway Services Inc.

By leveraging automated route optimization, Gateway Services significantly reduced driver workload. Where drivers once worked up to 13-hour days, optimized routing brought the goal of 7-hour shifts within reach—enhancing both employee satisfaction and operational efficiency.

Additionally, centralized data management eliminated the need for manual data transfers, reducing errors and allowing the team to focus on strategic growth. With a scalable routing solution in place, Gateway Services is now equipped to expand its operations confidently while maintaining high service standards.

The Results

Improved Route Efficiency

Advanced route planning reduced route overlap – reducing the number of routes, miles and drive time significantly while improving service reliability.

Centralized Data Management

Descartes’ centralized solution replaced multiple routing platforms with a single, cohesive solution. Eliminating the need for manual data transfers, reducing errors and planning time/labor, allowing Gateway to re-route their network of over 120 care centers at a pace and frequency that was impossible before.

Decreased Driver Workload

Optimized routing has cut driver shifts from over 13 hours to nearly 7, enhancing efficiency, speeding up depot turnovers, and increasing driver satisfaction.

Scalable Growth and Expanded Coverage

Enhanced productivity and streamlined operations have enabled Gateway Services to expand coverage and scale efficiently to meet growing demand.

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