Paragon Software Systems has enhanced its modular, last-mile fulfilment software with developments that will help retailers to offer more competitive delivery propositions. These updates to Paragon HDX are part of the company’s commitment to helping retailers better compete in the two-man home delivery marketplace where customer expectations continue to grow exponentially.

“The retailer’s ability to correctly fulfil the delivery service promised at the point of purchase with confidence is absolutely critical to a competitive proposition, regardless of whether they are offering next working day or seven days from receipt of order,” explains William Salter, Managing Director of Paragon Software Systems. “The latest updates to Paragon HDX are designed to remove operational barriers to delivering on customer promises and achieve even greater automation of complex fulfilment planning processes.”

Paragon HDX is a suite of last-mile fulfilment software modules used by many of the UK’s best-known retail brands. These latest developments across the Paragon HDX suite will deliver tangible benefits to both retailers and 3PLs offering shared services to multiple retail brands. They include:

Maximise use of all your vehicles and drivers within a fleet.

Instead of rigidly sticking to just one depot serving specific postcodes, network resources can be shared and all deliveries fulfilled within the promoted lead time even in the event of a depot being at capacity.

Maximise use of your specialist vehicles and/or drivers

Gain greater control over the rate at which different sized vehicles are filled to help maintain the customer service promise across an entire product range and service offering. Restrictions can be placed on smaller or specialist vehicles so they do not fill to capacity weeks or days in advance with standard loads, removing the risk of not being able to maintain published customer service levels for specialist deliveries.

Only plan what your warehouse has the capacity to pick

The ability to factor in upstream picking capacity across multiple transport plans ensures that delivery time slots will always be feasible for the warehouse to handle. This again ensures that retailers are not planning to fail by proactively managing upstream capacity.  

More options for balancing choice with cost

A more extensive set of slot scoring values provides the retailer with more information to enable the consumer’s choice of window. Retailers are able to confidently offer a wider range of cost-effective choices to the consumer.

Increased driver productivity and safety

More control over the hours of the day an area can be visited, increasing drop density in rural and remote areas, while restricting trips to unsafe urban areas after dark to protect the welfare of drivers. In addition, algorithmic improvements target an even greater increase in trip efficiency resulting in higher average drops per route.

Improved decision making

New improved data mart provides retail users with greater access to real and actionable data, enabling them to quickly analyse performance and gain insight into potential operational improvements and financial savings.

A choice of platform

Paragon HDX will now be available on the Microsoft Azure platform for those organisations seeking a cost-effective and secure cloud-based solution.

“Paragon HDX is already widely used by leading UK high street retailers and we are now seeing increasing demand internationally with new deployments in both the US and Australia this year. Irrespective of where our systems are in use, all customers are faced with the same pressure to meet constant demand to do more. It is, therefore, vital that we continually invest in our software products so that the last-mile order fulfilment solution can help retail and 3PL customers to further evolve their services to meet the exacting standards of today’s consumer,” Salter added.

Paragon Software Systems

About the Author: John Loughran