Case Study

Leading UK Parcel Delivery Company Overhauls Yard Operations with C3

A leading parcel delivery company, with an extensive ground-based network, required a best-of-breed yard management system to manage its exploding growth.

Considerable investment had been made to improve other aspects of the operation but the hub vehicle management system still remained a conglomeration of manual processes and legacy systems.

The Challenges

1

The problem relating to the accuracy of trailer inventory became more and more critical.

With the increased size of each newly constructed hub, line haul drivers, in particular, were wasting time finding trailers required for customer pickups.

2

The yard driver work plans were becoming more and more inefficient.

At times the entire operation would come to a standstill due to a strategic trailer move being assigned to the wrong driver. To avoid potential service failures, the yard driver pool was over staffed; further reducing the productivity of the drivers.

3

The amount of time required to process a trailer arriving at the facility was becoming problematic.

Manual processing at the gate was causing trailer arrivals to be delayed, causing lengthy queues outside the hub. This ultimately caused issues with the arrival of freight being delayed into the hub.

4

There was a lack of visibility of the necessary time required to unload trailers.

This further manifested itself in the inability to identify the amount of work each area had to process, hence managers were unable to react until situations were critical.

5

The operation had no means of pro-actively recognizing when a yard would be full.

A full or congested yard creates many different bottlenecks which increases the risk of service failures.

The C3 Solution

An extensive survey of the yard management market led to one vendor that had considerable experience in the post and parcel industry - C3 Solutions. The C3 team worked closely with the operation to devise a solution that was able to deliver value starting on day one.

The Gate processing time has been improved by 50%

while increasing information accuracy and site security. Gate staff are now able to assign the correct trailer to the correct door without consulting the transport office.

Trailer unloading times are now being captured to provide useful statistics

such as average unload time per customer. In addition, individual manager performance can be established by tabulating the number of trailers unloaded per shift. This increase in operational data provides an invaluable tool to continue to improve the day to day performance.

Yard driver efficiency has been improved by at least 15%

and yard drivers have embraced the new system. In addition, now driver performance data can be evaluated and shared back to drivers.

Yard traffic Flow is greatly improved

by proactively avoiding yard congestion and yard over capacity situations. Managers are alerted when capacity thresholds are crossed allowing pre-emptive measures to be taken.

As a project manager at C3, it’s very gratifying to know we’re making a real difference. Everyone expects the delivery of their online purchases to be perfect. It’s exciting to work with a world class company that makes this happen. When you work with a team that is passionate about what they do it challenges you to be your best and creates lasting relationships. "