Food and Beverage Industry

Delivering the goods fresh, on time, and efficiently takes careful routing and dispatching.

ArcLogistics helps you

• Honor complex business rules and your customers' special requests
• Optimize your staff and vehicle usage while cutting expenses
• Plan cohesive geographical territories for drivers/salespeople
• Integrate customer relationship management (CRM) software
• Track your vehicles with automated vehicle location (AVL) software
• Put it all together

Honoring Complex Business Rules

Route planning depends not only on vehicles, staffing, and speed, but also on the business rules imposed by customers.

Many food and beverage distributors, for example, cannot make deliveries during their customers' busy lunch periods.

ArcLogistics helps you respect this specific business rule by providing two time windows for deliveries.

Optimize Vehicle and Staff Usage

Food and beverage distribution companies often have several types of vehicles delivering product such as bulk routes, side loaders, trailers, presale, and driver-sale routes.

ArcLogistics uses a feature called Specialties to distinguish the various vehicle classifications, effectively allocating only bulk deliveries to bulk vehicles. A single routing plan may contain, for example, six bulk vehicles, 12 trailers, and 28 side loaders.

ArcLogistics allows you to distinguish among the staff required to drive the vehicles so goods can be delivered most efficiently, saving time and money while increasing the number of deliveries and improving on-time service.

Plan and Maintain Geographical Sales Territories

Another common complex business rule keeps drivers to specific geographic territories.

This business rule has two components, the first being the initial territory creation. ArcLogistics Route uses a plug-in developed by Infinite Enterprises and RouteSmart Technologies for territory planning. This plug-in creates and balances territories based on variables including the revenue generated by each customer, the number of customers, and time taken to visit the customers.

Second, after territories are created, ArcLogistics honors them by assigning vehicles to customers before routing takes place.

Integrate Your CRM or Route Accounting Software for Greater Efficiency

ArcLogistics is easy to integrate with customer relationship management or route accounting software, be it a custom-made proprietary system or a commercial system. Import of an order file is as easy as two mouse clicks, and export of the final routes can be achieved with one mouse click.

ArcLogistics does not try to duplicate your CRM database; instead it imports orders, creates efficient routes, and can put the results back into your CRM system if desired.

Track Your Vehicles and Drivers With AVL Software

Several ESRI business partners, such as CloudBerry and Navtrak, have integrated ArcLogistics with their automatic vehicle location products. Routes and customer stops and accompanying delivery data are placed as a background layer in the AVL tracking map, allowing the user to compare planned routes to actual routes driven.

Put It All Together

The total solution, including strategic territory planning, daily fleet routing, real-time tracking of vehicles, and management reports for statistical analysis, can be achieved at an affordable price with ArcLogistics.

Request more information about how ArcLogistics can help you.

Case Studies

• Beer Distributor Handles Holiday Rush With Ease
• Seafood Delivered Faster With ArcLogistics