Taking Food and Beverage Distribution to the Next Level

Using smart tech to deliver for evolving business and customer needs
!

Food and beverage distributors have never had it easy. Add in a pandemic, and its become even more of an uphill climb to plan deliveries, meet high customers expectations, and achieve healthy profits.

!

The pitfalls of falling short? Everyones bottom line suffers when customers are disappointed and products fail to show up at the right place, the right time, and in one piece.
!

But proven remedies exist. Top-performing organizations are relying on advanced strategies and logistics technology like strategic route and hybrid route planning combined with artificial Intelligence and machine learning to keep customers happy and safeguard product integrity and security.

!

AI-Based Solutions to Traverse a Competitive Landscape

These days, traditional delivery models are falling to the wayside. To consistently give customers what they want while controlling costs and addressing the labor shortage, it takes a mix of advanced strategies, tactics, and the latest technology.
!

Advanced route planning and real-time GPS-based execution solutions play a vital role in helping food and beverage companies be more flexible, responsive, and profitable.
!

To stay competitive, industry leaders are adopting:

Strategic Route Planning

• Identify the delivery strategy that optimizes customer service and profit
• Strategic route planning is a technology-enabled route planning process that determines the optimal combination and location of resources (e.g., distribution centers, fleet size, and drivers) to meet customer service and financial targets while considering service policies and operational practices.
• Constant changes in order volume and mix, customers, customer demands need to be evaluated for possible routing strategy adjustments.
• Model and evaluate the impact of potential changes to their distribution network before implementation.
• Understand the best approaches to entering new markets or consolidating acquisitions.

Hybrid Route Planning

• Serve customers uniquely while reducing delivery costs
• Traditional strategic route planning cannot keep up with customers higher service demands and changing order mix, resulting in poor customer service and inflated operating costs. Distribution operations are moving to Descartes Hybrid Routing, a blend of dynamic and static routing.
• With this solution, food and beverage distributors get the benefits of both dynamic routing and static routing. Dynamic routing allows key customers to continue to be served on a fixed schedule and then dynamically adds the remaining customers into a route, improving responsiveness to customer order changes (e.g., off-orders) and route productivity.
• Descartes Hybrid Routing uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms and is constantly learning from historical and real-time routing data to generate more accurate stop and drive times and customer delivery locations that improve customer service and reduce costs.

Proactive Route Execution

Orchestrating deliveries with maximum efficiency
!

Descartes route execution solution provides distribution companies the comprehensive capabilities needed to achieve true delivery orchestration. Through a combination of real-time optimization and GPS-enabled mobile applications, Descartes route execution provides:

• A closed-loop solution that proactively manages drivers throughout their route and frees dispatchers and managers to focus on exceptions and process improvement.
• All the route execution information captured is available in an easy-to-use real-time performance dashboard for drivers, dispatchers, and managers.
• Complete visibility to routes as they are being executed.
• Two-way communication automates delivery additions, deletions, and customers making last-minute schedule changes.
• Machine learning for more accurate ETAs.

Telematics

• Building business intelligence
• Telematics solutions continuously monitor vehicle and driver performance, helping food distributors comply with regulations such as the mandatory use of electronic logging devices to record hours of service.
• Our telematics solutions offer advantages like ensuring product safety, automatically recording trailer movements, and managing performance and compliance.
• Improve driver behavior and retention with performance management programs.
• Identify critical cold chain and traceability data points for chain of custody.

The Descartes Difference: A Seamless Solution

!

Delivery performance has never been more important for food and beverage distributors. The challenges of today's markets are causing a rethinking of distribution strategies and the role and value of distribution capabilities to the top and bottom line. But by adopting new business models, advanced distribution practices, and the right technology, distributors can accelerate forward.

Descartes is supporting food and beverage distributors around the globe with holistic routing, mobile, and telematics solutions. By combining AI and machine learning with our real-time planning and execution solutions, we leverage real-world performance data to better inform our route planning and execution solutions.

To learn more about our fully-integrated routing, mobile, and telematics solutions designed specifically for the food and beverage industry, visit Descartes Food & Beverage Distribution Success.
!