The Customer
Route4Me Helps True Heart Roses Conquer Valentine’s Day
True heart Rose Company is a wholesale company that supplies flowers, primarily roses, through agreements set up with major stores, gas stations, neighborhood stores and small groceries. One of their major clients is Walgreens. The company covers the whole Houston, Texas area, from Rosenburg to the west, south to Galveston and parts of San Antonio, as well.
With 21 people employed, there are 6 drivers, and 400 stores receiving normal weekly deliveries of fresh flowers, about 30-35 stops a day, per truck. For holidays, such as Valentine’s Day, the company added another 60 stores, increased personnel on trucks to 12 and delivered ten to fifteen times the amount of flowers. During holidays, trucks carry more flowers and drivers need to spend more time with client stores, to ensure that their flowers are well-presented and managers are happy. More flowers and more public relations time spent, means that drivers can only cover 15-20 stops a day, during holiday periods.
Challenges
The company was founded by Young Bohle’s father, who, until he semi-retired this year, planned all routes by memory and wrote them out. After son Young Bohle started taking a more active role in the business, his father mapped routes by memory, as always. After the holiday, when Young looked at the record of deliveries, he noticed drivers were criss-crossing large areas to make deliveries on each side and traveling from one end of the city to another. Many of the drivers were familiar with the stores, but some addresses had changed, or were faulty.
Solution
Young looked online for assistance in route optimization and found Route4Me, which consistently was ranked high in Google listings. On Valentine’s Day, using Route4Me cut route planning time in half. Young placed 3-4 different routes on the screen, then rearranged them by driver (to pair drivers with stores they knew and managers with longstanding relationship with those drivers) . He looked at how the routes appeared on a map and then kept stops for one driver all in one region, eliminating the criss-crossing of the past.
The result was great: deliveries were much easier; managers were happy—a successful Valentine’s Day!
Benefits
As True Heart Rose Company is a wholesale operation, with major contracts, they do not focus on advertising to the public, don’t have a website or logo, and do not use sales personnel. Their name is spread by the roses themselves, and recommendations from their clients—to other businesses. However, their clients, like Walgreens, are increasing the numbers of their stores, and the company sees Route4Me as an important partner to help them keep up with their clients.
In the meantime, next stop: Mother’s Day!
