Pepsi optimizes routes with flexible territories

Seasonal fluctuations affect most businesses in the food and beverage industry. Adapting to the ups and downs to minimize wasted time and maximize productivity is an ongoing challenge - one that has a major impact on profitability.

“Before dynamic routing [from Verizon Connect], you couldn't route day-by-day," says Teeter. "A driver might have 200 cases on his truck one day and he's done by noon. The next day he might have 800 cases," says Jay Teeter, Logistics Manager, Pepsi Bottling Co.

"So this dynamic daily routing takes those huge swings out of it.”

The Pepsi Hickory facility, which averages three million cases annually, has recently switched over many of its route trucks to box trailers with liftgates. The trailer allows for pallets of different sizes, with pre-filled orders to speed up delivery and overall efficiency.

One thing was missing - route optimization software to complement the changes.

Why Pepsi chose Route Optimization Software

When exploring options for route optimization software, Pepsi had some specific requirements: they needed the routes to retain some consistency, including specific delivery days, time windows and preferred customer/driver combinations.

At the same it had to allow for flexibility to develop the most optimal routes and job assignments that would standardize load sizes with the fewest number of routes.

Many of the available routing products required driver territories to have fixed borders that limited routes to being sequenced within those boundaries, which was a very time-consuming process.

Verizon Connect offered a refreshingly flexible approach.

“Every time you move or make a change, you can see it adjust the revenue, the cases, whatever metric you are using. It's a good process to begin a more strategic reroute.”

Jay Teeter, Logistics Manager, Pepsi Bottling Co.

Verizon Connect Territory, allowed Pepsi to create geographic-centric routes without limiting routing options to those boundaries. This provided for dynamic variables, which resulted in routes that were far more efficient than other solutions.

The results were all the evidence Pepsi needed to know they had made the right choice with Verizon Connect routing solutions.

• 720 fewer routes per year (per location)
• Significant fuel savings
• Less wear and tear on delivery trucks
• Balanced workload across all drivers
• 25% fewer trucks during the busy season
• Orders fed directly into route building solution (via API)
• Dispatchers saw impact of route changes on cost and load size in real time
• Ease of operation compared to previous system
• Flexible territories with fuzzy boundaries for more efficient routing

Pepsi is planning on expanding the power of dynamic territories to more of their bottling plants around the country, and benefit from optimizing routes more strategically to further improve efficiency and productivity across their delivery fleet.