Victoria Kickham, an editor at large for Supply Chain Quarterly, started her career as a newspaper reporter in the Boston area before moving into B2B journalism. She has covered manufacturing, distribution and supply chain issues for a variety of publications in the industrial and electronics sectors, and now writes about everything from forklift batteries to omnichannel business trends for Supply Chain Quarterly's sister publication, DC Velocity.
Struggling under the weight of accelerating order volumes, furniture retailer Raymour & Flanigan needed a high-tech solution to the delivery challenges brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic—challenges that included finding drivers, maintaining on-time performance, and meeting increasingly high customer demands.
Business as usual simply wouldn’t do in this new pandemic-driven reality.
“[Their system] was typically a highly manual operation,” explains Guy Bloch, CEO of the fulfillment and delivery cloud platform provider Bringg, which partnered with Raymour & Flanigan to solve the problem. “Traditionally, this meant planning all routes in advance, scheduling deliveries and service appointments by phone, reminding customers and rescheduling based on customer requests by phone call, and maintaining a good deal of paperwork.”
With Bringg’s technology platform, Raymour & Flanigan was able to digitize those operations, improving performance metrics and customer satisfaction in one fell swoop.
GOING DIGITAL
Raymour & Flanigan is one of the largest furniture and mattress dealers in the Northeast. Demand for product delivery soared in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic kept consumers close to home and drove online shopping for home-improvement products, furnishings, and related products and services. Leveraging Bringg’s last-mile technology solution would help the retailer scale operations to keep up with the burgeoning demand, while also adapting to shifts in shopping patterns that were likely to stick around well after the pandemic subsided.
The companies took a phased approach to implementing Bringg’s technology, which connects a retailer’s supply chain systems with internal and third-party fleets on a single platform. The manual route planning, scheduling, and adjusting would all be brought online, powered by artificial intelligence (AI)-based algorithms that not only speed up processes but also provide data-driven insights for better decision-making.
The system was up and running within months, according to Bloch.
“Making the digital jump involves implementing and integrating new systems, processes, and training. We took a phased approach, first deploying and optimizing one technology, and then the next, to minimize operational disruption and ensure optimal adoption and impact,” he explains. “For example, driver app adoption enables a host of capabilities. As driver app adoption began showing impact, we moved on to the routing automation [stage]. Subsequent phases included digital customer notifications, digital self-service customer scheduling, and real-time branded customer tracking.”
Bringg’s technology was integrated with Raymour & Flanigan’s legacy systems, creating a seamless end-to-end solution.
REALIZING IMPROVEMENTS
Measurable benefits came quickly but were most notable when the retailer began using Bringg’s automated routing capabilities to streamline deliveries.
“The impact in stops per truck was significant, and further improvements have continued to drive this efficiency,” Bloch explains.
Since implementing the platform, Raymour & Flanigan has increased delivery volumes by 40%, seen a 36% increase in deliveries per truck, and reduced late deliveries by 56%. And company leaders say customer satisfaction levels have risen to 90%.
“Bringg’s technology drove our logistics digital transformation, increasing performance and innovation that exceeded our efficiency, scalability, and customer service objectives,” Bryan Anastasi, Raymour & Flanigan’s vice president of customer care and business solutions, said in a statement describing the implementation. “Their speed and flexibility will continue to drive our performance and innovation for years to come.”
Since the initial tech implementation, Raymour & Flanigan has migrated its on-site service teams to the Bringg platform. This includes giving service technicians access to the driver app, the routing and customer-notification capabilities, and the platform’s automated appointment scheduling features.
“This is a great example of how the platform molds itself to each use case’s requirements, optimizing toward each customer’s objectives,” Bloch adds.
Toyota Material Handling and its nationwide network of dealers showcased their commitment to improving their local communities during the company’s annual “Lift the Community Day.” Since 2021, Toyota associates have participated in an annual day-long philanthropic event held near Toyota’s Columbus, Indiana, headquarters. This year, the initiative expanded to include participation from Toyota’s dealers, increasing the impact on communities throughout the U.S. A total of 324 Toyota associates completed 2,300 hours of community service during this year’s event.
The PMMI Foundation, the charitable arm of PMMI, The Association for Packaging and Processing Technologies, awarded nearly $200,000 in scholarships to students pursuing careers in the packaging and processing industry. Each year, the PMMI Foundation provides academic scholarships to students studying packaging, food processing, and engineering to underscore its commitment to the future of the packaging and processing industry.
Truck leasing and fleet management services provider Fleet Advantage hosted its “Kids Around the Corner Foundation” back-to-school backpack drive in July. During the event, company associates assembled 200 backpacks filled with essential school supplies for high school-age students. The backpacks were then delivered to Henderson Behavioral Health’s Youth & Family Services location in Tamarac, Florida.
For the past seven years, third-party logistics service specialist ODW Logistics has provided logistics support for the Pelotonia Ride Weekend, a campaign to raise funds for cancer research at The Ohio State University’s Comprehensive Cancer Center–Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute. As in the past, ODW provided inventory management services and transportation for the riders’ bicycles at this year’s event. In all, some 7,000 riders and 3,000 volunteers participated in the ride weekend.
After years in the military, service members and their spouses can find the transition to civilian life difficult. For many, a valuable support on that journey is the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) SkillBridge program. During their final 180 days of service, participants in the program are connected with companies that provide them with civilian work experience and training. There is no cost to those companies while the service member continues receiving military compensation and benefits.
Both sides benefit from the program. “We’re proud to work with SkillBridge to give back to our military veterans for the bravery and sacrifices they’ve made for all of us,” Troy Pederson, director of training and development at LiftOne, a Hyster-Yale dealer and established SkillBridge employer, said in a release. “In the last year, we’ve helped 10 SkillBridge interns transition from military to civilian life, and the value and positive impact of the program can’t be overstated. At LiftOne, we’ve gained so much from the experience and diverse mix of technical and leadership skills of our SkillBridge candidates.”
Raise your hand if you think you’re a pretty good driver. Now put your hand back down, because we’re about to introduce you to someone who has set the bar much higher than you can ever dream of reaching.
Meet Greg Swift, a longtime driver for Schneider National Inc. who has driven 5 million miles without a preventable accident. The Green Bay, Wisconsin-based carrier boasts a notable safety record: More than 6,500 of its drivers have traveled at least 1 million safe driving miles with the company. Swift, however, stands out from that crowd, joining only two other drivers in Schneider’s nearly 90-year history in reaching the 5 million-mile mark.
Swift’s achievement was recognized with a parade, a “Sound the Horn” celebration—a long-standing tradition of sounding a truck horn inside the headquarters building to celebrate achievements—and a $10,000 bonus.
And if you’re wondering how long it takes to motor 5 million miles, that’s the equivalent of driving to the moon and back 10 times. Swift began that odyssey 33 years ago when he started his career with Schneider after leaving his teaching job. He now runs a dedicated route for Schneider customer Georgia-Pacific.
In his time as a driver, Swift has witnessed the evolution of trucking technology from paper maps to advanced GPS and collision-mitigation systems, but his advice to new drivers is simple and technology-free: Plan ahead and manage your time efficiently.
Look around any distribution center and you’ll see dozens of devices powered by batteries. They range from large-scale cells in electric forklifts, to mid-size units in autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), to slim, palm-size batteries in barcode scanners and smartphones. Despite the ubiquity of these applications, there is more work to be done. That’s why a battery-industry group has launched an initiative it hopes will encourage the next generation of engineers to continue developing smaller, safer, more powerful industrial batteries.
The effort is funded by donations from BCI member companies, including the lead donors Entek and Daramic, as well as gifts from more than a dozen other companies, including such distribution center stalwarts as Crown Battery, East Penn, and EnerSys.
Logistics service providers looking to cut emissions from their transportation operations have largely focused on the switch from internal combustion engines to battery electric vehicles (BEVs). But some proponents say that hydrogen fuel cells are a better way to generate the electricity required to reach that goal. A new demonstration project now underway is designed to prove their point.
The FCEV began real-world testing on routes in the San Francisco Bay Area in August. Over the next few months, the truck will head down to the Los Angeles area before making its way to northern California and then to western Canada.
Those tests follow similar demos in Australia as well as a July trial of Hyzon’s Class 8 FCEV tractor-trailer with some of its North American fleet customers, which include waste haulers. According to Hyzon, those tests showed that hydrogen fuel-cell technology is a viable replacement for heavy-duty diesel engines and can overcome some of the inherent challenges associated with other zero-emission technologies, such as fluctuations in operating temperatures, payload limitations, and short ranges (the company says its hydrogen fuel cells provide the refuse-collection trucks with reliable power for up to 125 miles).