The challenge
Prior to eLogii, J-Club were operating semi-static routes with the regional managers of their various regions being extremely active within the planning process. Managing exceptions, such as sick days, was difficult and due to the manual nature of the planning, it was extremely time consuming. J-Club wanted to improve planning efficiency and reduce the number of kilometres covered by their merchandisers out in the field.
As well as improving efficiency, they were looking to make the planning process less HR intensive and to free up their regional managers to spend more time with the customer.
Making the process more agile and increasing the ability to respond to changing circumstances and context (but still having regard for efficiency) was important.
“Before eLogii, our regional managers were spending significant time planning and re-planning routes. Due to the way we were planning, we were doing everything in silos and missing significant opportunity for optimization by sharing our resources across out entire portfolio of stores” – Jord van Dijk – IT Director, J-Club
The process
The team, led by IT Director Jord van Dijk, launched a search for a route optimization solution that was able to look a weekly (or longer) planning horizons and handle the scale of J-Club’s growing operations. They needed a robust, flexible optimization engine as well as an intuitive, visual planning interface. A robust API was also required to interface with J-Club’s internal systems quickly and reliably.
As a highly customer-centric business, J-Club had to ensure that whatever solution they chose would enable them to get the right merchandisers to the right stores at the right times.
During the search, the team ran tests on over 5 market-leading solutions and ultimately chose eLogii which score highest overall on their rigorous benchmarking.
The solution
With eLogii, J-Club gained a solution that enabled full automation of route planning across their entire operations at once, taking into account all of their required visits, but also all of their available field merchandisers. As a result of eLogii’s ‘skills’ function, J-Club were able to ensure that the right groups of merchandisers (for example based on languages spoken, seniority level etc.) would be making the right visits.
With eLogii’s powerful optimization engine, J-Club were able to trigger optimizations and re-optimizations (taking into account changed variables and circumstances) quickly and efficiently allowing for planning to always reflect current resource reality and customer requirements.
Planning which used to take place in the regions themselves now was centralised into a single responsible function overseeing all of the regions which allowed for significant streamlining of operations.
The ability to plan upfront and take into account current / prevailing circumstances meant that J-Club was able to always have an accurate forecast and know exactly what would be possible and executable out in the field.
Routes were always realistic and executable as a result of the multitude of constraints being taken into account simultaneously (from required merchandiser skills to time windows) in the context of real-life (and historical data) for example traffic.
In the event of visits (or groups of visits) not being executable, users at J-Club were informed via eLogii’s intuitive dashboard that these were unviable and had to be ‘handled’ – for example by increasing the pool of potential merchandisers.
Further, with the suite of tools offered by eLogii’s broad solution, J-Club were able to do dry-runs / run scenarios in an environment separate to their main, operational environment. This allowed for the team to effectively territory plan and see live the impact of any changes made versus the ‘master plan’.
“With eLogii we basically have it all covered, every single operational variable and constraint in a package that is both visual as well as technically powerful which interfaces with all of our existing systems. The system has essentially become the backbone as well as the brain of our planning operations and has automated tasks which were previously almost entirely manual” – Jord van Dijk – IT Director, J-Club
The results
3 FTE equivalents saved in the planning process (with regional managers being able to focus on tasks with the greatest pay-back) – as a result of the planning process being fully automated via eLogii, 1 day per week was saved per regional manager which previously would have been used for planning. This has also directly led to regional managers being able to spend more time in stores which has led to a significant improvement in results.
“Regional managers are now able to focus on the tasks that really matter for our business as opposed to there being a lot of time taken on the routing front. This has directly led to us being able to streamline and centralise the routing function which has had clear and direct benefits for the business” – Jord van Dijk – IT Director, J-Club
300-400,000km less driven per year (10%+ saving) – as a result of better routes, merchandisers are able to drive less distance while efficiently carrying out visits meeting the required visit frequency.
Improved consistency of customer experience – despite it not always being the same merchandiser visiting the same customer (as a result of greater resource sharing between regions), the customer experience has been standardised at an extremely high level
Significant headroom for growth – the planning team will not need to be expanded even when the business is 3-4x larger as a result of automated planning which will operate at an unlimited level of scale
