American Signature Furniture Cuts Delivery Costs By 18 Percent With New Route Optimization System

(Torrington, CT) 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.

A Better Solution for Fleet Routing

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

The 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 pilot 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 delivered data more consistently, dispatchers were able to locate drivers at any time.

Significant ROI from VCR

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 cubes 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.

This improvement is reflected in 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.

InterGis creates and markets proprietary software solutions that perform automated routing, scheduling and vehicle optimization for companies who have transportation, delivery or distribution fleets and for companies who have field service or mobile workers. InterGis products are designed to bring cost-saving, operational efficiencies to these businesses by providing software that produces the least cost assignment and best utilization of resources of work to be done, through a suite of easy-to-use, visual/graphic tools. InterGis also offers their software to developers and other business associates who are looking to form partnerships in marketing complete solutions, or use the routing, scheduling and mapping engine within their own software applications.

About Intergis
Intergis is a leading single-source provider of mobile resource management and logistics technologies for small, medium and large businesses in a variety of industries. Intergis solutions integrate GPS vehicle tracking and navigation tools with automated scheduling, dispatching and route optimization applications and real-time communications technologies. Intergis helps customers gain efficiencies in their operations and get measurable results quickly to control costs, improve productivity, minimize risk and increase customer satisfaction. Intergis is headquartered in Cranford, New Jersey. For additional information, please call 877-483-7428.

Press Contact: Andrew Lavin/Dana Govern, A. Lavin Communications, 212-290-9540, alc@alavin.com

Intergis Contact: Susan Roca, 443-766-1352, sroca@intergis.com