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Agricultural merchant Zantra is implementing Maxoptra dynamic route planning and scheduling software to manage deliveries of its crop protection solutions.

One of the largest independently owned agrochemical merchants in the UK, Zantra will use Maxoptra to optimise routes in order to reduce unnecessary mileage, control costs and minimise the environmental impact of its transport operations. Integrated with the company’s TomTom telematics solution for real time updates, Zantra believes Maxoptra Delivery will safeguard the company’s reputation for fast and efficient customer service, and help deliver further improvements.

“Put simply, if we fail to deliver the best advice and product selection, on time and in full, then we fail to deliver what our customers – and their crops – require,” commented Russell West, Logistics Manager at Zantra. “By introducing Maxoptra vehicle routing and scheduling, we can ensure our regional depots are fully stocked with the right products at the right time, and our delivery fleet is utilised to its maximum potential.”

“During April, our delivery fleet makes eight times more drops than it does in mid-winter, so it was important the solution we chose was flexible and easily scalable,” continued West. “Rather than tie us into long contracts, with large up front investments and crippling support fees, Maxoptra was willing to work with us to implement a solution that exactly met our current requirements and future needs.”

The farming-family owned business has grown substantially since it was established in 2003, mainly on the strength of its service and commitment to customers, and now operates a nationwide service supplying crop protection products, nutrients, fertilisers and seed from leading manufacturers. Based at Great Staughton, Cambridgeshire, Zantra maintains a network of strategically located, BASIS approved depots, including Doncaster in the north, Faversham and Winchester in the south and Telford in the west.

Stuart Brunger, Maxoptra Business Development Director added, “It is important to remember that one size does not fit all, which is why Maxoptra is the choice of businesses such as Zantra, which experience seasonal peaks and sustained growth.”

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Commercial catering and refrigeration equipment service provider Serviceline has transformed its field service operations with the Maxoptra dynamic scheduling and planning system from Magenta Technologies.

Serviceline has completed stage one of the project to streamline its operations by providing better visibility of its mobile resources and availability of service engineers’ time.  By automating 90% of field service tasks, the company now has time to focus on enhancing customer service.

Serviceline has 120 engineers collectively possessing more than 400 different skill sets. Planning, matching and allocating work to the best qualified service engineer is very challenging, especially when new jobs come in during the day, which continually changes priorities.

“We had this vision of what we wanted the business to achieve. For us, customer service is key. It’s all about communication, the relationship you build and maintain with your customers. We always had a belief that if we could automate the planning and scheduling process to quickly provide the information our people needed to make the best decisions, then they would have more time to talk to customers,” said Steve Elliott, Managing Director of Serviceline.

“Maxoptra is the embodiment of that concept. It is the first and only dynamic scheduling and planning system that we have found which does that, where there is the programming functionality to take away 90 percent of what our staff had to do manually.”

Elliot continued: “It used to take six months for a new planner or dispatcher to learn fully how to use the two booking systems we used to manage the complexity. Now we have complete visibility of where our engineers are and the status of each job. This allows us to consider options and make the best routing and planning decisions quickly.”

The software is fully integrated with the existing SaaS telematics platform, to provide a map-based real-time display of vehicle location, job status and work schedule. Serviceline can now have optimised schedules from Maxoptra sent directly to in-cab terminals, allowing the field engineers to navigate to their jobs and report their progress in real time. The system also highlights variances from plan.

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