Direct Window Supplies Ltd. (DWS), manufacturers and suppliers of windows and doors, is using Podfather logistics software to streamline and automate its delivery service.
Serving trade installers across the south-west of Britain, DWS makes around 700 deliveries of plastic and aluminium products a month. Using Podfather’s planning, route optimisation and ePOD solution, DWS is saving hundreds of man hours a year, working towards paper free deliveries and reducing its mileage by between 8 and 10 percent. In addition, Podfather’s automated ETA notifications and real-time tracking is boosting DWS’s customer service.
“We have expanded at an exponential rate culminating in the opening of a new 20,000sqft aluminium production facility this summer,” commented Nick Trueman, General Manager at Direct Window Supplies. “We also celebrated our thirty years in business milestone. Both of these achievements have been made possible by our loyal customers, dedicated employees, and supportive supply chain partners. However, as we have grown, we realised that some of our legacy workflows and practices are not supportive of this growth trajectory,” he continued. “The planning and execution of deliveries had become a time consuming and resource intensive task, taking up to 2 ½ hours a day, and multiple sheets of paper per job. We were also receiving large volumes of calls asking for updates on when deliveries were due.”
Since implementing the Podfather delivery system earlier this year, DWS has reduced the time taken to plan next day deliveries from hours to minutes saving, on average, around 10 plus hours a week or 25 percent of the original resource. It has also removed physical delivery sheets from its workflow, reducing its paper consumption by more 1,500 sheets a month. Podfather’s advanced route optimisation features have also had a positive impact for DWS decreasing overall mileage, across the 5-vehicle fleet, by between 8 and 10 percent.
