It used to be the milkman who delivered fresh food to your door. Today, it’s online grocers like FreshDirect, a rapidly growing company that serves residences and offices in the New York City metro area.  And they bring a lot more than just milk. Fresh produce, frozen goods, bakery items, heavy beverage cases and cumbersome bags of pet food – all delivered to a customer’s home, on the customer’s schedule. And that’s the complicated part.

When a customer places an order online, they select their own delivery date and time window. That feature is crucial to making ordering groceries online practical for consumers, but from a routing perspective, it can be complex - requiring a different approach to routing than fleets with standardized routes.

For FreshDirect, every day’s route and cargo will be different from the day before. Maximizing the efficiency of each route while meeting customer delivery windows demands smart software. And for FreshDirect, that software is Roadnet^® NetScheduler from Roadnet Technologies.

A dynamic business model

Roadnet engineers developed NetScheduler specifically to meet the needs of the home delivery market, which has somewhat different needs from other Roadnet customers. These businesses must meet their customer commitments while putting as many deliveries as possible into each route. NetScheduler does that for them in a very dynamic way.

While Roadnet^® Transportation Suite tools are targeted toward fleets that may have a combination of standard and dynamic routes, NetScheduler was created for organizations like FreshDirect with a 100% dynamic business model in which customers pick their own delivery windows in a self-service model.

The system has the intelligence to present available windows to each customer throughout the order period and up until the route is filled to capacity. It can even generate discounts or other incentives to encourage customers to choose windows that optimize the route.

FreshDirect entered the New York market in 2002 and began using NetScheduler in 2009, replacing a manual system that was labor-intensive and offered only  limited scalability. Since adopting NetScheduler, FreshDirect has been able to dynamically fill capacity each day – letting the routing system maximize each route and determine when to stop taking orders.

The company credits NetScheduler’s automation and intelligence with an estimated 8% overall improvement in routing efficiency and on-time delivery improvements of 3%. NetScheduler has also enabled the company to expand into less dense suburban areas without increasing costs per delivery.

“For us, every day is a matter of productivity – maximizing our truck utilization and deliveries per hour while absolutely meeting our customer obligations,” says Rod Mathey, senior transportation analyst at FreshDirect. “We don’t ever want to leave a delivery on the table, but we also don’t want to miss a single customer window. NetScheduler helps us strike that balance.”

NetScheduler also provides FreshDirect with some discretionary flexibility to adjust its routes and meet specific customer demands. For example, if a route fills up, the company can use Roadnet’s Routing Editor to “force” deliveries for its best customers by suggesting and evaluating time slots manually.

“We of course have exception processes, so we can set aside capacity for our most loyal customers or adapt to a truck break-down,” says Mathey. “We can also add driver input into the system if there are conditions in a neighborhood that make deliveries more time-consuming, for example.“

Growth and possibilities

Today, FreshDirect delivers approximately 60,000 customer orders per week, with Sunday and Monday typically being the busiest days on its schedule. Growth in orders delivered per week has been brisk for the past few years and is continuing.

“NetScheduler gives us plenty of scalability,” adds Mathey. “It will help us confidently grow and enter new areas, even estimate marginal cost for each new order based on distance and other factors. That will be useful as we expand our coverage.”

“There are a lot of opportunities for innovation with NetScheduler – from things like discounting to user-customized delivery windows,” concludes Mathey. “It’s the business case we haven’t established yet. But it’s always great to have possibilities.”