Food & Beverage

Food and beverage manufacturers simply cannot pass along higher costs to their customers. Instead, with transportation and commodity prices on the rise, they must find new ways to drive down costs in their distribution network to maintain their competitive edge and profitability.

Descartes helps food and beverage companies:

• Reduce fleet requirements.
• Improve the number of average stops per route.
• Redesign territories, fine-tune frequency of service visits and continuously re-optimize routes for maximum performance and reduced costs.
• Improve customer service.
• Identify supply chain issues quickly to reduce cost of delivery failures (out of stocks, plant shutdowns, service failures.
• Measure delivery performance in aggregate and by retailer.
• Improve cycle times through decision support of inventory allocations and global visibility of inventory.
• Improve operational efficiency for plant/distribution-to-retail store delivery.
• Reduce write-off costs due to a reduction in obsolete inventory.
• Synchronize merchandisers, sales representatives and deliveries.

Food and beverage manufacturers will find that the Descartes Delivery Management Suite can address business challenges including Strategic Delivery Planning, Warehouse Optimization, Daily Planning (Route Planning), Reservations, Transportation Management, Supply Chain Visibility, MobileLink/Dispatch/Automated Vehicle Locator (AVL), Reporting Services and Connectivity & Messaging.

The Descartes Global Logistics Network (GLN) helps connect trading partners quickly and efficiently using one of the world's largest multimodal networks of transportation and logistics services providers and their customers.

Descartes' food and beverage customers include:

• Sara Lee
• Schwan's
• Foster's Group
• Coca-Cola Korea Bottling Company