Neill’s Home Store Automates Planning & Scheduling To Create A Digital Checklist For Deliveries

We’ve got a retail furniture store, we run 1-2 trucks for deliveries, and our main goal was to basically get away from flipping through a file folder, estimating on the fly, what we can add or whether or not we have to go to another day. As far as deliveries go – we wanted to maximize our routes each and every day.

Most of our clients are individuals. At our current location we do, probably 70% of our business comes from second home-owners. They live elsewhere and they travel here to vacation or their second home is also a rental property, an income property for them. We do a lot of business in condos and lake homes.

The biggest thing was, just as our business grew, having a week’s worth of file folders to try to go through and find where we have time just became very cumbersome. You make a sale, we have a product that arrives and is ready for delivery. It’s not just a simple click a couple of links and see a listing of where you are going to be and what kind of time frame you’ve got. Okay, here’s 10 stops for the day, let’s put that into Google Maps and let’s evaluate whether or not we can add another stop based off of the load we’ve got. Then we’ve got people that are scheduling not just a few days out but a few weeks or even a month out. That gets a lot harder to keep a track of.

We have things scheduled upwards of a month to two months out. It is according to when our customers are going to be back in town or that’s when their house will be completed those sorts of things.

We had two different systems before we switched to Upper Route Planner. For the first system, we had a big board in the office with all of our delivery dates for the week and we just clipped the pages there. That was all there was. That process became inefficient because we had too many deliveries. So then we switched to a file-folder system. We pulled out, let’s say today is 22nd November, so we pulled out 22nd November’s folder, we would know what we needed to do. Then throughout that day we would be prepping for the 23rd.

We have used it a little bit for service aspects. We have a separate team for that will handle that. But it is nice to know we can look through. Suppose we got a customer call saying the table is not leveled. Well, actually, we’ve got a delivery scheduled in your area tomorrow. It’s real quick and easy and we know it’s not going to throw off their delivery route because we want them focused strictly on that. Something that’s gonna take a lot more time then we’ll see if we can get a slot within the next week. but if not then, we know we need to pass it on to another team.

The main thing is having a digital checklist and see where they are in the route. So they’ve got 5 stops in the morning run, we know that they are completed on the run and they are on their way back. Or we know that they are still on their first stop and it is supposed to take them just 15 minutes there and it’s a hour and a half later. If they are having any issues, we can kind of start to adjust the remaining part of the day to help them make up that time.

It’s been very good. On our first call, we were able to chat for an hour and a half describing what we’re looking for, able to give feedback on what we like and don’t like. Those are actually taken into account. Building out processes or new concepts. To have that feedback heard is nice. We’ve been using Upper Route Planner for 2 to 3 months. Each month we find it to be more and more useful. Every employee is getting used to how to use it. It has definitely been beneficial for that. Everybody has got a baseline and since this is kind of a baseline that this has to be done. So it forces them to do other processes within the office to make sure Upper is ready to go and the routes are set. So far I’ve been pleased with it. Obviously learning new software you run into headaches and issues because you’re just not used to using them because you’re used to using a file folder. It keeps us on track of not overbooking and causing issues for my own employees.

Yes, I would because it gives you a way to see a simple way to see your day-to-day routes whether it’s a consistent route that you always run or if its how we do it, each one is a customer route, we have to put in how long each stop is going to be. It just gives you a visual of maximizing your day.