There is nothing quite like a good nights sleep. So it is especially good news to find out that one purveyor of such wonders (i.e. a bed and mattress retail company) has been able to step up their deliveries by using dedicated fleet management technology.

Bed experts, Dreams has been able to increase it’s efficiency of its home deliveries by turning to Paragon’s Home delivery system (HDS) as part of their fleet management technology solution.  This means that all 6,000 weekly nationwide weekly deliveries will be planned and scheduled for the Dreams head office. The system will allow for the customer to be provided with a selection of optimised dates so they can choose one which suits them for their delivery. This is available to them  either at the point of sale in store or when they make a purchase online.

“When a Dreams customer buys a bed our Microsoft Dynamics NAV system will calculate the earliest availability for the product. This information feeds through to Paragon HDS, which then works out the available delivery dates to offer the customer. The information is presented graphically to our sales staff in red, amber and green, with green being the most efficient delivery,” says Ian Clarke, Change Controller, Dreams.

“We offer customers the ability to book a delivery up to 90 days in advance if they require it; typically most choose between 10 and 15 days after making a purchase. We also have much more flexibility to move deliveries around if we need to and we can close off routes earlier. In fact, with the latest version of the software we can also shut off a depot early and we can pause specific routes, if necessary to maximise efficiency.”

Dreams currently operates eight home delivery depots, which aided by a fleet management technology suite from Paragon, enables them to cover the entire of the UK and they plan to open a ninth depot soon which will be based in Scotland and will add further efficiency to their routes with its ninth depot opening soon. The deliveries are made using the company’s fleet of 100 x 3.5 tonne Mercedes Sprinter vans.

“Paragon HDS completely eliminates all manual elements from our delivery planning. It gives us much tighter control of how many vans we need and the number of driver shifts required to achieve the plan. Together with our stock availability system, we have a much clearer view of our supply chain as we can plan when goods need to be in the depots and we’re now running some as stockless, having just the items they need to deliver within the next 48 hours,” says Ian Clarke.

Perhaps the key benefit of HDS is the automatic integration with the other elements of the fleet management technology that Paragon are already delivering to Dreams including GPS vehicle tracking units in the vans using Paragon Fleet Controller. Giving Dreams the ability to monitor delivery progress in real-time and providing them with a live report feed. This feed is then published on the Dreams intranet to show how deliveries are progressing and allows customer services to keep customers updated with ETAs.

This visibility includes being able to see the exact current status of each delivery and report whether the van is at the customer’s home or has completed the delivery and is on its way to the next drop.

This of course means that the field service management team can sleep well at night knowing they are running as efficiently as possible!

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