American Signature Furniture cuts delivery costs with Intergis Visual Control Room

American Signature Furniture (ASF) designs, manufactures, sells, and delivers furniture in 19 eastern states in the U.S. The company, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has about 6,000 employees and operates 130 stores and five Distribution Centers that feature its branded home furnishings.

ASF operates a 650-vehicle fleet of trucks and service vans that deliver its products to homes and businesses. Dispatchers receive calls for repairs or merchandise replacement throughout the day and send a service technician in the area. However, this means technicians have different schedules and routes every day.

The company recognized that its manual system of grouping customer calls on slips of paper by zip code was inefficient, so it purchased a scheduling software tool, hoping it would automate the process. While this was an improvement, the system wasn’t user-friendly, couldn’t handle their highly complex routing and scheduling requirements, and provided spotty GPS service.

In April, 2007, ASF ran a pilot program with six delivery trucks and two service vans to evaluate the Intergis Visual Control Room (VCR) Solution – a fleet management system that automates routing, scheduling and tracking. VCR receives real-time information at fixed, programmable intervals from the Intergis Maya GPS hub installed in each vehicle, programmed to transmit each service technician’s location.

VCR routes and schedules the eight vehicles and displays the pertinent information on a single screen, so dispatchers can see all the data as well as updated information in real-time. For unscheduled calls, repairs and deliveries, VCR automatically determines the appropriate driver to dispatch and pinpoints the optimal route. Drivers receive text messages on the order via cell phone, laptop, or PDA. Once the call is complete, they upload the work order status to the Intergis system, reporting if it was completed or on hold.

In just a few months, on only eight vehicles in Springdale, Cincinnati, the program yielded impressive results. What used to take several hours per day to manually plan routes and schedules now took only 25 minutes using the Intergis VCR system. Because the installed Intergis GPS hubs deliver data more consistently, dispatchers are able to locate drivers at any time.

The Intergis system has enabled ASF to significantly increase the weekly number of deliveries and repairs by 15 percent and its delivered dollars-per-mile traveled by a whopping 25 percent. ASF has also reduced its mileage costs by 15-20 percent using the route optimization system, and overtime expense for the delivery teams by 12 percent.

In addition, the company has improved its capacity per delivery truck by an impressive eight percent, enabling more cargo to fit in the vehicles.

Customer satisfaction has noticeably improved as well, since delivery teams arrive on schedule for delivery appointments more frequently, and the system provides more actionable information for each call as well as the entire delivery system. A similar improvement has been demonstrated on the service technician routes as well.

ASF plans to use the Intergis VCR to manage all 650 vehicles in its nationwide fleet and the majority will be equipped with GPS devices including Maya, depending on the application.

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