When your company is known as “New England’s leading specialty foodservice distributor,” you have to deliver on your reputation every day.  Such is the case for Paul W. Marks Co., Inc., a family-owned business that has been serving the New England region for over 50 years.  The company prides itself on its high standards of customer service, its knowledge of the region, its select product lines, and its attention to individual customer needs. “We’re not the kind of company that tells a customer to take it or leave it,” says Brian Shavor, Director of Operations at Paul W. Marks.  “If they have a special order or delivery need, we do our best to fulfill it.”

In serving the needs of its 2,000 current customers (including regional restaurants, colleges & universities, smaller wholesalers, and food product plants), Shavor and his team need to reconfigure their routes every day to accommodate special requests and shifting seasonal needs.  In addition, pick-ups from local vendor sites must be factored into the schedules.  “Every single day, all of our 17 trucks will go out,” says Shavor.  “If it’s a one-stop delivery, they’ll come back, refill up, and head out for another delivery.  So we can have up to 25 changing routes on a busy day.”

Then there’s the time-sensitive nature of the products themselves. While Paul W. Marks distributes spices, specialty grocery items, desserts, and breads, it is known especially for its exceptional dairy products, including domestic and imported cheeses, creams & milk, butter, eggs, and specialty items.  In most cases, the perishable nature of these products makes on-time delivery (even with modern refrigeration trucks) more critical.

Soon after he arrived at Paul W. Marks in 2003, Shavor saw the need for a new routing system for the company.  “I definitely knew there was an issue,” he recalls.  “The old system was too complicated, not user-friendly and made its one dedicated operator too valuable.  If anything happened to him, none of us would have known how to operate the system.”

After reviewing several vendors, Shavor selected UPS Logistics Technologies for its two solutions, Roadnet^® and MobileCast^®.  Shavor specifically wanted a system that was robust but easy to learn and manage by more than one employee.  With Roadnet and MobileCast, he quickly achieved all three goals.  “We jumped into it right away,” he says.  “As soon as the software was installed and live, we really started using it within a week.  While there was a lot to learn and a good deal of information to put in, implementing these two solutions was easy.”

The company also saw immediate results and returns following the implementation.  Shavor points to an initial return on investment in just 90 days, gaining efficiencies that included a reduction in mileage of 54,000 miles and a 5,200-hour reduction in overtime.  In addition, says Shavor, the company was able to eliminate a truck “and still deliver our service at a much higher level.”

Shavor attributes this overall rise in customer service to the deployment of Roadnet and MobileCast.  “We try to accommodate all customer needs and that’s where Roadnet comes into play,” he says.  “It allows us to honor those requests in the most cost-efficient manner.”  In just four hours every afternoon, Shavor and his team are able to build and tweak the next day’s routes using Roadnet.  Seasonal changes in schedule can be easily adjusted and routes redesigned to accommodate the shifting volumes of day-to-day customer needs.

In effectively monitoring the real-time progress of daily routes, MobileCast is according to Shavor, “our core service.  We now know when a driver’s going to arrive and depart 95 percent of the time, and can let our customers know of any changes right away.”  With all Paul W. Marks drivers now equipped with handheld MobileCast devices, any customer concerns can be relayed via text message back to the company’s Customer Service department within five minutes.

“I’m certainly a fan of UPS Logistics Technologies,” says Shavor.  “They offer great 24/7 support on all of their products.  Best of all, their solutions are all about providing better service to customers.  If you use them, your business will benefit.”