Imperial Dade Canada Delivers & Delights w/ Mass ePOD & Shorter Driver Hours
Last-mile delivery in any supply chain is a meeting point of customer service, driver management, and reporting. With 100+ drivers and up to 40 invoices per customer, paperwork and phone calls were becoming too big of a drain on Imperial Dade (formerly Veritiv) Canada's resources.
10 months into using Track-POD, driver time is reduced by 1 hour daily. Self-customer service with real-time tracking eliminated almost every call on the status of the order. Finally, mass ePOD turned 10-12 hours of paperwork scanning into minutes.
About Veritiv Canada
Veritiv Corporation (NYSE: VRTV), headquartered in Atlanta and a Fortune 500® company, is a full-service provider of packaging, JanSan and hygiene products, services and solutions. Additionally, Veritiv provides print and publishing products, and logistics and supply chain management solutions. Serving customers in a wide range of industries both in North America and globally, Veritiv has distribution centers throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and team members around the world helping shape the success of its customers.
Veritiv Canada’s delivery fleet of 100+ vehicles handles paper distribution and supplies packaging, groceries, and various materials to businesses across industries, including field service providers.
With supply chain pressures and restrictions caused by the pandemic, Veritiv Canada’s customers needed clearer order visibility than ever before. Time-sensitive orders and limited supply amplified the need for live tracking and reliable ePOD solutions.
Challenges
In addition to delivery time slots, the team needed to meet the demand for last-mile visibility. That would include real-time tracking, instant ePOD’s, and a simple self-service mechanism to answer customers’ eternal question: “Where is my order and when will it arrive?”
"Many hours were spent just to answer a simple question as to when a customer’s order will be delivered." - Steve Del Fatti, Senior Manager, Supply Chain Solutions for Veritiv Canada
To make matters worse, some of the drivers would come back with 300 pages of paperwork that had to be scanned into the archive, which only allowed 30 pages at a time. This resulted in 10-12 hours of paperwork scanning into the system that wasn’t 100% reliable in accepting the data.
“Customers had to sign every single invoice to prove delivery – some had up to 30-40 invoices to sign at a time.”- Rob Barr, Veritiv Canada Transportation Manager
Veritiv Canada’s Deliver & Delight approach to customer service didn’t meet with the heavily manual, driver-unfriendly system in place. Together, Rob Barr and Steve Del Fatti laid down the requirements and started looking for a last-mile visibility solution.
Here is what they were looking for:
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Real-time order tracking.
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Valid ePOD for all deliveries on Veritiv Canada’s fleet.
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A self-service mechanism for customers to know when their orders arrive.
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Driver time savings (back then a driver potentially needed 24 min per delivery).
Solution
After 6 months of vendor research, demos, background checks, and a lot of trial and error, Rob came across Track-POD.
“I ran up to Steve and showed him Track-POD because I was so excited – it was everything we wanted, out of the box.”- Rob Barr, Veritiv Canada Transportation Manager
A customer-centric last-mile process was now clear. Customers are no longer required to sign every single packing slip as proof of delivery.
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SMS and email notifications with a live tracking link would allow customers to monitor the real-time progress of their orders.
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Electronic Proof of Delivery meant that there would be no more paperwork scanning and customers would be able to sign off on many deliveries at once.
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Track-POD offers multiple language versions which complied with Canada’s dual-language requirements.
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The driver app was user-friendly, which meant that the deployment and learning would be instantaneous.
User-friendliness was a big point for Veritiv Canada as the Track-POD rollout happened during the covid pandemic. The launch was planned out by division, with the help of a few video recordings sent out to drivers across Canada.
“Training drivers on the mobile app was seamless. Track-POD is simple enough just to visually go through a video and you know how to do it.”- Steve Del Fatti, Senior Manager, Supply Chain Solutions for Veritiv Canada
Now that Track-POD is API-integrated with Veritiv systems, there’s no more manual data loading. Accessible to all stakeholders, the system was easy to implement across the board for maximum supply chain visibility.
“Not only have we utilized Track-POD right out of the box for our fleet of drivers, with no enhancements needed, we were able to load the bill of lading/tracking numbers for each order delivered by our third party carriers.”- Steve Del Fatti, Senior Manager, Supply Chain Solutions for Veritiv Canada
To save even more time on tracking and driver management, Rob is now beta-testing the Track-POD Route Manager app. It powers instant capability to stay connected remotely and view the status of drivers and orders on mobile.
“Overall the app’s amazing, it saves me a lot of time running back to my office to look for stuff – it’s just a touch on my phone.”- Rob Barr, Veritiv Canada Transportation Manager
Results
Since introducing Track-POD 10 months ago, the team has seen significant reductions in communication between customer service and shipping.
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Over 300 customers are using SMS or email notifications with live tracking.
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24 minutes of driver time per delivery was reduced to 17 minutes.
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Driver time per day is reduced by 1 hour on average.
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The sales team no longer receives calls concerning orders out for delivery.
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Drivers don’t need to call customers prior to delivery.
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Almost every call concerning order status has been eliminated.
“The difference between then and now is that we have the flexibility to adjust on the fly.”- Rob Barr, Veritiv Canada Transportation Manager
With Veritiv Canada’s needs in mind, the Track-POD team improved the estimated time of arrival (ETA) feature. Now refreshed every 5 min based on the driver’s actual location, updated ETA is displayed in the dashboard, giving all web users accurate information about the actual arrival times.
Looking into the future, Steve and Rob are excited to explore Track-POD’s routing and optimization features as well as set up more customizations and tweaks, especially in reporting.
“There are a lot of features that we originally weren’t looking for but were already in there, which is awesome. The system has everything we’ve been looking for.”- Rob Barr, Veritiv Canada Transportation Manager
