Case study
How CACI & Ordnance Survey (OS) data helped McQueens Dairies enhance their business, routing & milk delivery
Summary
McQueens Dairies is a third-generation family firm that provides doorstep milk delivery. Established in 1995, they began with a single milk round in St. Andrews, Scotland. Fast forward three decades and they deliver to thousands of households throughout the UK.
Over the last six years, CACI and Ordnance Survey (OS) data have been helping McQueens Dairies enhance their business, routing and milk delivery.
Company size
1,000
Industry
Transportation & Logistics
Services used
Challenge
House numbers are not always sequential, and in dense housing areas, you can’t always drive to the front of every house. The larger distances that must be travelled in rural areas in addition to the added number of minutes per delivery from where a driver can park to a property’s front door can become costly for the business. Moreover, while the average postcode contains 15 properties, some postcodes can contain up to 100. As a result, even having the correct address does not always eliminate ambiguity. With this in mind, McQueens Dairies contacted OS CACI partner in 2017 with the aim of optimising their routing and reducing that ambiguity to effectively reach customers on a broader scale.
Solution
To optimise their vehicle routing, McQueens Dairies have been using a bespoke solution from CACI called StreetServicer. Underpinned by OS AddressBase, StreetServicer is ideal for microlevel routing, such as meter-reading, milk deliveries or refuse collection. McQueens selected CACI’s StreetServicer as it proved to be the superior solution compared to what other providers they spoke to could offer, and they recognised the tremendous efforts made by CACI to ensure the project would operate successfully.
Microlevel routing from StreetServicer also informs delivery drivers on what side of the road to walk on and when to cross the road. This provides the most optimised journey possible, whether they’re in their milk float or they must park it to carry out the rest of the journey on foot. StreetServicer has been supporting McQueens by equipping their drivers with the most efficient delivery routing rounds down to the exact coordinate.
Results
- Since adopting CACI and OS data, McQueens Dairies have reduced their fuel consumption by approximately 100,000 miles per year.
- 30 minutes per delivery shift have been saved thanks to routes being mapped out for drivers in microlevel detail.
- A significant reduction in the burden on administrative staff has been experienced, as it would have taken two full-time staff to manually route all rounds every day.
