The Kerfoot Group, a leading provider of speciality oils to the food, technical and personal care industries, is targeting improved customer service and reduced transport costs using Paragon’s routing and scheduling software. The company will use the planning system to manage a fleet of HGVs that are responsible for more than 200 weekly deliveries across mainland UK from two production sites in the Port of Goole, East Yorkshire.

The advanced routing and scheduling software will also be integrated with The Kerfoot Group’s vehicle tracking system Fleetboard, using Paragon’s Route Execution module, enabling the whereabouts and status of its fleet to be monitored against daily delivery plans. This will allow the transport planners access to real-time vehicle data, so they can provide imminent arrival notifications to customers or proactively alert of any potential delays. It will also provide a mechanism to capture and collate historical “plan versus actual” performance data to identify opportunities for continuous improvement within the transport operation.

The Paragon software has replaced the manual transport planning process that was used to schedule the delivery of orders to The Kerfoot Group’s diverse range of customers including food manufacturers, wholesalers, caterers and retailers. With the company experiencing a strong period of growth, it needed greater levels of visibility and control over the transport operation as well as the ability to track how plans were being executed.

Moving forward, The Kerfoot Group expects to significantly reduce the time required to create transport plans, which are based on a typical five-day lead time from order through to final delivery. It will also use Paragon Street Level Mapping to achieve far higher levels of planning accuracy and provide precise arrival times to customers. This will help achieve the optimum levels of fleet utilisation as well as efficiently plan the collection and return of empty intermediate bulk containers (IBCs) to minimise empty running and potential equipment shortages at the production sites.

Nick Rice, Group Logistics Manager at The Kerfoot Group commented: “We needed a planning solution that would support our aggressive growth strategy within the UK by creating a highly-efficient and-optimised transport operation that would meet current and future needs. We looked around the market and decided that the Paragon software is the routing and scheduling package of choice in the UK. Using Paragon’s routing and scheduling software we are aiming to deliver more oil for less miles, while ensuring our customers receive an accurate and reliable delivery service in line with our commitment to unrivalled service levels.”

William Salter, Managing Director of Paragon Software Systems said: “The Kerfoot Group needed a solution that would not only provide an effective means of planning its transport requirements, but also allow it to understand the impact of operational issues on customers and identify any inefficiencies. The ability to analyse historical data and model what-if scenarios will allow the planning team to increase utilisation of their fleet and ensure that their delivery service is an integral part of the The Kerfoot Group’s high quality customer service.  By using our routing and scheduling software integrated with its vehicle tracking system, The Kerfoot Group will now be able to create optimum schedules which can then be monitored in real-time, while having the ability to track performance over time to improve its service.”

Paragon Routing

About the Author: John Loughran