Case Study: American Signature Furniture Cuts Delivery Costs By 18 Percent With New Route Optimization System

American Signature Furniture (ASF) designs, manufactures, sells, and delivers furniture in 19 eastern states in the U.S. The company, which is based in Columbus, Ohio, has about 6,000 employees and operates 130 stores and five Distribution Centers that feature its branded home furnishings.

ASF operates a 650-vehicle fleet of trucks and service vans that deliver its products to homes and businesses. Dispatchers receive calls for repairs or merchandise replacement throughout the day and send a service technician in the area. However, this means technicians have different schedules and routes every day.

The company recognized that its manual system of grouping customer calls on slips of paper by zip code was inefficient, so it purchased a scheduling software tool, hoping it would automate the process. While this was an improvement, the system wasn't user friendly, couldn't handle their highly complex routing and scheduling requirements, and provided spotty GPS service.

In April, 2007, ASF ran a pilot program with six delivery trucks and two service vans to evaluate the Intergis Visual Control Room (VCR) fleet management information system which automates routing, scheduling, and tracking. VCR receives real-time information at fixed, programmable intervals from the Intergis Maya GPS hub installed in every vehicle and programmed to transmit each service technicians' location.