Tarmac, the UK’s leading sustainable construction solutions and building materials business, is using Podfather route planning and optimisation tools to improve operational efficiency and boost customer service.
Operating across the UK, Tarmac is rolling out Podfather logistics software to plan, route and report on more than 30,000 deliveries a week. Operating from Inverness to Southampton, and transporting aggregates and asphalt, as well as ready-mixed concrete, the use of Podfather will help Tarmac improve consistency in its planning, reduce unladen mileage and release additional customer service resources.
“Using Podfather, we can plan to a set of rules, regardless of personal preferences or geographical priorities, which allows us to operate across borders, allocating routes fairly and consistently,” commented Ben Garner, Logistics Director at Tarmac. “This is allowing us to transition from purely next day planning to more live, dynamic planning, which in turn, means our team can be more responsive and reactive to our customers, building relationships and having the capacity and tools to troubleshoot if required.”
Tarmac has been working with Podfather for a number of years, having first introduced its ePOD (electronic Proof of Delivery) solution and real-time tracking in 2017, which at the time, although familiar for home deliveries, was considered an innovation for the construction sector. Digitally capturing date, time, and location stamped photographs and signatures, Podfather’s ePOD tools are thought to be saving Tarmac in the region of three-quarters of a million sheets of paper every month. The system also means that all delivery information is available, when needed, at the click of button, to answer customer queries, and it has had a positive impact on Tarmac’s OTIF KPI results.
Building on this success, Tarmac has been working with Podfather to further deploy the Podfather system and realise additional operational benefits and service improvements. The nationwide roll-out of the route planning and optimisation solution was designed to introduce consistency in the planning process and maximise cross-border opportunities.
“This hasn’t necessarily been an easy process. We are dealing with experienced people and changing the way we do things,” Garner continued. “However, we are already seeing positive impacts on the business. We are able to evidence to our third-party hauliers a fairness of allocation, and we are increasing their productivity by improving the ratio of laden vs unladen mileage, by up to 10%, which has a direct impact on their bottom line!”
Tarmac, a CRH company, is the UK’s largest construction materials company. It employs around 7,000 people across a network of more than 350 sites across the UK and has 150 years of experience and heritage. Tarmac moves millions of tonnes of essential construction materials to local, regional, and national infrastructure projects, every year, utilising the road and rail networks. It operates one of the largest HGV fleets in the UK which travels more than 50 million miles on public highways every year, and is committed to continually improving the environmental and safety performance of all vehicles and operating responsibly.
