Client AreaThere seems to be a perpetual tug of war between increasing delivery frequency to improve sales and reducing delivery frequency to save on transportation costs.
The pendulum seems to swing one way or the other depending on recent sales results, fuel price changes and other forces that are out of your control.
While more frequent deliveries can only help sales, it’s difficult to know if the benefits outweigh the costs unless you have a solid grasp of the additional delivery costs. Reducing delivery frequency can produce quantifiable savings however there comes a point where reducing delivery frequency will negatively impact sales.
Your transportation management solution should provide some insight to at least one side of the equation. The image below is an excerpt from a CAMS report that indicates the amount of goods broken into day of week and route group for a given date range. This report can be sorted a variety of ways such as by cases, cubes, weight, pallets, by week, by day of week (important) across large sample sizes of historical data.
Stores cannot be analyzed in isolation however. You need to look at what other stores were combined with each other and be cognizant of the total number of cubes on the load. If the loads are typically cubed out or nearly cubed out then reducing delivery frequency for any stores on those loads may not be feasible. It may not be impossible, but it’s not exactly low hanging fruit. Moving fully loaded trailers from 4 deliveries per week to 3 deliveries per week won’t reduce the overall number of loads or miles driven.
