Sept/Oct 2003

Johnson Service Group, the workwear and dry cleaning specialist, says it has made "substantial savings" in workwear rental collection and delivery costs with judicious use of the TruckStops routing and scheduling system, which was supplied by UK agent Kingswood MapMechanics. The system has been used both for streamlining its fixed delivery patterns, and to help in a "customer migration" programme involving the transfer of accounts between branches.

So far the savings are in the order of 4 per cent, according to corporate strategy director Simon Moate, "which with our volume of business is substantial."

The company is using the latest TruckStops Roads version, which can plan routes in relation to a digital map network as well as by its established time and distance method. Johnson has also taken a module called Route Reporter, which automatically generates a line of route report for delivery schedules produced by TruckStops, showing times and distances to each stop.

These calculations are normally performed by a runtime version of GeoConcept, the geographic information system also supplied by Kingswood MapMechanics, although in this case the company is also using the full version.

The savings have been made by subsidiary Johnson Apparelmaster, which operates from a network of 17 laundry and distribution bases throughout Britain and Northern Ireland, and serves around 40,000 customers with a fleet of 275 vans.

As 'find nearest' concept gets refined

Not only can you automatically find the nearest location (depot or customer, for instance) to any given starting point with a new system called Service Allocator; you can also find the four next-nearest options.

It's done by a module developed by Kingswood MapMechanics for the GeoConcept geographic information system. It uses real-life map-based drivetimes to work out proximity, then adds information on the travel times, distance and location to the original data. A high-street retailer doing local marketing and a home shopping company applying differential delivery charges are among early users.