When Should Food Distributors Use Strategic Planning Software? 

Distributors have many reasons to invest in strategic planning. Common use cases include redefining fixed routes, adapting to seasonal demand, and integrating new customers or acquisitions.  

Fixed routes aren’t truly fixed. They should be re-optimized on a regular basis to keep up with fluctuating demand, seasonal spikes and new customers. 

Recutting fixed routes can be time-consuming. Planners need to juggle territories, frequencies and contractual demands while controlling fuel and labor costs. It’s no surprise that many distributors only revisit routes a couple of times a year.  

As a result, plans don’t hold up against fluctuating demand. Routes built in January fall apart during the summer season.  

A purpose-built solution allows you to adjust routes more often and respond to changing demand, seasonal spikes, and holiday schedules. Planners often uncover ways to absorb volume spikes without adding vehicles.  

• By analyzing past data, the software can simulate a range of demand scenarios, fine-tuning factors like order volumes, delivery cadence and territories. 
• Planners can create tailored models for busy and quieter periods. 
• Instead of moving stops forward or backward to account for holidays, strategic planning software can balance workloads across the entire week. 

Food distributors can’t leave frequency planning to chance. Clients depend on a reliable delivery cadence to meet customer demand, reduce spoilage and avoid stockouts.  

Some deliveries are guaranteed by a particular day, and many establishments require a certain number of days between deliveries. High-volume accounts tend to have strict delivery windows, while smaller accounts may be more flexible. 

This complexity makes it difficult to manage frequency manually. Without doing the math, it's easy to over- or under-service customers. Some routes end up overloaded, while others have low density and a high cost per stop.  

Strategic planning software weighs up these constraints to build cost-effective routes that meet service level agreements (SLAs). 

• Software considers the required frequency, allowed service days and time windows for each customer, as well as the number or days between each visit.  
• Rather than optimizing one day at a time, the solution creates weekly or multi-week plans that balance workloads, route density, and customer service. 
• Distributors can also take a hybrid approach. High-volume accounts are served by fixed routes and smaller orders are routed dynamically to fill in the gaps. 

Fleet size determines your ability to serve customers profitably. Running an oversized fleet is expensive but, with too few vehicles, deliveries fall behind. 

With the wrong vehicle mix, distributors may wind up unable to meet demand for specialized produce, or unable to keep up with orders in urban areas. Planners improvise and vehicles end up running extra trips half empty.  

• The right strategic planning software allows you to test “What if?” scenarios such as: 
  • What happens if we reduce fleet size by 10%?  
  • What if we replaced some box trucks with cargo vans? 
• Fleet operators can run scenarios side by side to compare outcomes like distance, cost, number of routes, and on-time performance. 

These decisions shape your cost base and service levels for years. With the right mix, you reduce fuel spend, improve utilization, and adapt to fluctuating demand. 

Territory design and depot placement directly impact cost, service quality and growth potential.  

But all too often, depot selection is based on arbitrarily drawn territories.  Acquisitions bring overlapping routes and uneven workloads. Zones look balanced on a map, but some are stuffed with high-volume supermarkets while others are scattered with small restaurants.  

With suboptimal depot placement, fuel and labor costs quickly add up. What’s more, uneven coverage could mean you’re leaving revenue on the table. 

Strategic planning software can examine the network holistically to optimize depot placement and territories: 

• The right solution considers costs, workload and customer service constraints to select the optimal depot to serve each customer.  
• It's possible to model scenarios side by side to answer questions like “Where should we open a new depot?”, or “Are there any low-density regions where we should add new clients?”  
• For each scenario, you can see the impact on cost, delivery density, work hours and service levels. 

Strategic planning software reduces the burden of long-term decision making. However, traditional solutions take several steps to produce an optimal plan: 

• Territories are cut 
• Delivery frequencies are assigned 
• Delivery days are selected 
• Routes are sequenced 

With this method, frequency planning is left up to guesswork. And each step must be repeated if it breaks the rules laid out by previous steps.     

Instead, Descartes takes a data-driven approach. The software uses historical and forecasted orders to optimize territories, frequencies, delivery days and routes in a single pass.  

With this process, food distributors can easily remodel their delivery network when demand patterns shift.  

Single pass strategic planning lets distributors prepare for spikes, balance workloads and service more customers. The result is a more cost-effective network that consistently delivers on time, at profit. 

Get in touch to future-proof your delivery fleet today.