Flowervision

Route Optimisation and Customer Service Provision are Flourishing for Flowervision thanks to New & Improved eTrakLogic® Solution from Dakota

The Company

Flowervision Bristol is a leading floristry wholesaler supplying high quality fresh cut flowers, plants and sundries to florists across Bristol, the South West of England and South Wales. Part of the wider Flowervision Group with branches in Birmingham, Lancashire, London, Nottingham, Norwich and Southampton, Flowervision Bristol has a long-standing and close relationship with Dutch exporting partners Duyvenvoorde, based at the FloraHolland flower auction in Westland.

Together with the Flowervision Group, a dedicated fleet of refrigerated lorries operates five days a week transporting fresh flowers and plants directly from Holland to the Bristol cash and carry, ensuring freshness, quality and consistency every single day.

Alongside offering an extensive range of cut flowers, indoor and outdoor plants and a vast range of sundries, from floristry essentials to luxury ceramics and gifts, Flowervision also prides itself in its unrivalled level of customer service. Supporting its operations is a fully managed and dedicated transportation team and fleet of drivers, ensuring a seamless, reliable and comprehensive delivery service for its customers across the South-West and Wales.

When Flowervision sought to take its customer service provision to an even higher level, the company contacted Dakota, the real-time data capture, printing, mobility, support and voice-directed solution specialists, for assistance in attaining its key goals and objectives.

The Problem

As a twenty-five year old company with an ever-growing customer base, Flowervision Bristol wasn’t experiencing any issues with its customer service provision. The ‘problem’ simply lay with its desire to embrace emerging technologies to enable the company to move with the times in order to keep up with its consistent client growth and to ensure that its excellent customer service legacy was still being maintained, alongside bringing the company and its delivery processes right up to date.

The aspiration for this progression prompted the Team to sit down and review their current processes to decipher where evolution and improvements could be made. They ascertained that fixed delivery routes were too rigid in the way that they were set up, simply because that was the way that they always had been generically managed, without perhaps looking at potential adaptability in terms of route management and optimisation to give customers and its fleet of drivers the very best possible results.

Flowervision wanted its fixed routes to become more efficient by taking on a diverse and adaptable structure, which would in turn enable customers to get orders even earlier and receive real time information upon the whereabouts and precise delivery time of their order, thus minimising time-consuming calls into Flowervision’s office for updates.

So whilst Flowervision wasn’t experiencing any problems per se, a fresh look at available technologies had changed the company’s mindset and mentality in terms of looking at adopting a bespoke solution to make the whole delivery undertaking operate in a much more efficient manner, alongside methods to manage the business differently and consequently offer an even higher customer service performance standard.

The Solution

After looking at a range of potential solutions, Flowervision contacted Dakota and worked with its team of experts to implement its eTrakLogic solution alongside Flowervision’s fleet of delivery vehicles.

Philip Jarrett, Commercial Director at Dakota comments, “Having taken the time to discuss Flowervision’s requirements at length alongside our experienced Account Manager Jon Daly, we understood that it was of paramount importance to its drivers to have easy access to mission-critical data at their fingertips when they were out on the road. This would provide them with comprehensive information in terms of what items needed to be delivered to whom and when, as well as outlining the most optimum routes to enable them to get to the point of delivery in the most efficient manner, all whilst keeping customers continually updated. This was especially critical in light of the current rigorous and time-consuming DEFRA border inspections. Flowervision’s customers needed to know in real time the status of their delivery so that they themselves could plan their day ahead and consequently have access to data which would enable them to operate their own businesses more effectively and efficiently. Recommending our new eTrakLogic solution was the perfect fit to enable all of these requirements.”

The development of Dakota’s new and improved eTrakLogic solution comes as a result of its new partnership agreement with Optimize; award-winning market leaders in commercial fleet route optimisation, decarbonisation and transformation. This collaboration has resulted in an impressive number of user-focused, game-changing features previously unavailable on the preliminary version of eTrakLogic.

The new version of the solution enables fleets to optimise, decarbonise and transform through the deployment of powerful algorithms based upon artificial intelligence (AI), allowing businesses with vehicle fleets of any size to generate cost savings and efficiencies of up to 30%, increase productivity and reduce carbon emissions.

Nick Hudson, Managing Director at Flowervision Bristol explains, “The ability to provide accurate and transparent delivery notifications to our customers was a key component in the decision to move forward with eTrakLogic, as well as the capability to take photographic evidence of delivery locations and times if required and the provision of accurate delivery information to our drivers. The eTrakLogic solution makes the most economic routes available to the drivers via their Zebra Technologies TC27 mobile computers, alongside guidance on how the van should be unloaded to enable swift and accurate product delivery. Drivers are also prompted to undertake vehicle checks prior to setting off on their route to ensure that their vehicle is safe, whilst providing the Transport Manager with reports to ensure that the fleet is being proactively maintained.”

Zebra TC27

The Result

The result of the eTrakLogic implementation have been far-reaching. Drivers are fully equipped with all the information they need wherever they are located, and are now fully enabled to independently load up the vans correctly. Customers are automatically kept fully up to speed with their order status in real time so that they can plan for their own day ahead, and delivery routes are now fully optimised, enabling Flowervision to reduce its fuel costs and the volume of customer query calls into the office.

Nick Hudson, Managing Director at Flowervision Bristol concludes, “The implementation of the eTrakLogic solution has quite simply been a transformative game-changer for our organisation. Not only does it enable us to save on time and fuel costs through efficient route optimisation, it also helps us to better serve our customers thanks to the provision of accurate delivery data, which is continually updated and provided to them in real time. It has also helped us to reduce our overall carbon emissions and since the safety of our drivers is of paramount importance, the prompting of vehicle checks has gone a long way in keeping them safe. We are delighted to have been working alongside Dakota and Optimize on this project and are already realising the multitude of benefits that we were promised right at the very start of the project. For anyone operating a fleet of vehicles, whatever its size or nature of its usage, the eTrakLogic solution is definitely worth exploring further.”