Digital Mapping
Retail furniture fleet uses technology to cut clerical mistakes, and that's just for starters.
JOHN BENDEL
TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
"I'm cutting down on clerical people too, not just mistakes,'' said Richies Delivery President Richard Deslongchamps (pronounced dey-long-shomp) Jr. "We don't have to physically enter a lot of the information.''
CUSTOM SERVICE, MULTIPLE SITES
With a fleet of 42 2,600-pound GVW straight trucks — with 30 more on order — Richies runs a custom furniture delivery service for high-end stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Georgia.
"We have owner-operators who work for us in trucks that we lease to them. We do the deliveries for a lot of the Ethan Allen furniture stores and Thomasville furniture stores,'' Deslongchamps explained in a distinctive New England accent.
Richies Delivery, Inc., is headquartered in West Bridgewater, Mass., 20 miles or so south of Boston. The company's first customer 15 years ago was an Ethan Allen store in the city. Deslongchamps still runs five trucks from that location.
"What we do is invisible to the customer. When the trucks pull up they say Thomasville or Ethan Allen on them. They only way you'd know it's us is where the DOT numbers are on the side of the truck it says Richies Delivery. Even the drivers that contract with me are in a uniform that says Ethan Allen or whatever,'' Deslongchamps said.
"We pretty much set up management in their offices and run the deliveries for the stores. That's what's unique about us. When I set up shop, say at my Cabot House location — their warehouse, their customer service, where their people are — I literally have two managers sitting there in their office.''
Deslongchamps is no technology novice.
"I tried tracking a long time ago. We went with a GPS system back when it was Bell Atlantic/NYNEX up here. You had to log onto the Web and track the guy. It was a lot easier for us to click the two-way radio and say, hey, where are you?''
Digital mapping routing is a different story. Deslongchamps makes practical use of the RouteView mapping and routing system from RouteView Technologies, Inc., of Burnsville, Minn. (www.routeview.com), a company with many customers in furniture and retail delivery.
CREATING AND WORKING WITH ROUTES
Deslongchamps uses RouteView at most of his locations, including Cabot House Furniture in Amesbury, Mass., where 11 trucks deliver approximately 150 stops a day.
"Before we used to have to go through, rough-break (deliveries) by city, break them up by trucks, then go into the map books and route them all. If you had to switch things around you were bouncing from page to page in the map book. Now my managers can see all the stops for whatever day they're working on, all on one screen,'' he said.
Deslongchamps said his trucks don't run to the same areas every day the way most common carriers or package delivery services do. Like many other retail delivery services, Richies routes to different areas as required. He described a typical day's routing session at the Cabot House location.
"We start at our furthest point and we make a route. We say, okay, that's enough for one route. You hit Ôset new route,' you type in the driver's name, boom; there's his route. Then you go on to the next one. We can keep making the routes without having to mumbo-jumbo things around, all the handwork we used to have to do,'' Deslongchamps said.
According to Paul Tollefson a partner at RouteView Technologies, RouteView works a bit differently from other routing software. The system sorts deliveries geographically — by ZIP code, for example — before routing. Individual routes are then created from the sorted deliveries.
This allows routers to quickly and easily make manual adjustments. It also prevents the system from creating routes that cross each other, he explained.
"Our routing now takes about an hour for ten, eleven trucks. It used to take five or six hours easy,'' Deslongchamps said.
THE SOFTWARE INFORMATION TRAIL
Richies Delivery Service uses RouteView even at small locations like the five-truck Boston Ethan Allen, even though five trucks could be easily routed by hand.
"The reason is we hook it right to each (customer's) computer system and we download the information. Before they would schedule deliveries in the areas I designated and they would hand a stack of slips and we would have to go through them and route them.
"Now, it's a lot less paperwork, a lot less hassle. We connect to their system and we download their information right out of their computer,'' said Deslongchamps.
RouteView, he explained, has interfaces with software systems used by many furniture distributors. But even if a specific interface isn't available, RouteView can import relevant delivery data.
Deslongchamps cited his Cabot House account that does not have one of the major software systems.
"They have an old computer program. But you do it by setting up a report. We had their IT guy set up a report that downloads all the information to a text file. We just import that file into RouteView.
"You figure 150 customers, 150 addresses, 150 phone numbers. It's not only saving me time on the routing, but my billing is automated too, now. My main office doesn't have to enter all the billing into there. We already have it in our system.
"So what we do, when we're done with RouteView, I export it to my computer system. So it comes in from theirs, goes into RouteView. We do the routing, then we export it back to their system and mine.
"What it really did for me, if you want the short and long of it, is say a place like Cabot House that takes two managers of mine to handle without RouteView would be a three-manager job.''
Deslongchamps may be giving GPS another try. RouteView plans to introduce a module integrating GPS and two-way wireless communication. Drivers will have handhelds to record information and communicate from delivery sites.
"As soon as the driver's done he hits a key and it will automatically pop up on our computer screen. It'll change the color of the stop,'' said Deslongchamps. "I haven't bought it yet. I'm waiting for them to work the bugs out.''
According to RouteView's Tollefson the new product called TracView is currently in development.
