Case Study Streamlining Delivery Routes for a Food Wholesaler

Estimated 3 min reading time

📦 Case Study: Optimising Delivery Routes for a Food Wholesaler

✨ At a Glance

• The Challenge: Manual route planning for 200+ daily orders took a full working day.
• The Solution: A custom-built, fully integrated route optimisation tool.
• The Result: Delivery planning time cut to 20 minutes and over £36,000 saved per year.

🔍 The Challenge

A long-standing food wholesale client approached us with a delivery bottleneck.

We had already built them a custom Warehouse Management System (WMS) tailored to their internal processes, streamlining their picking and checking workflows. But one major inefficiency remained - delivery routing.

Every day, over 200 orders were exported into a spreadsheet, manually grouped by location, plotted on Google Maps, and manually assigned to delivery vehicles. This process could take an entire working day to complete and was prone to human error.

They'd trialled an off-the-shelf logistics tool (we won’t name names, but it starts with an S) - but the eye-watering £4.5k monthly license fee and lack of proper integration with their Order Management System (OMS) meant it still required manual work. The ROI just wasn’t there.

🛠️ The Solution

After exploring several options together, we designed and built a custom routing tool that integrated seamlessly with their OMS.

Using Google OR-Tools, Google Maps, and Next.js, we developed a multi-vehicle route optimisation solution that:

• Pulled orders directly from their existing OMS
• Converted delivery postcodes into GPS coordinates
• Generated optimised routes that minimised total travel distance
• Balanced workloads across the fleet based on capacity and volume
• Allowed for manual overrides when needed
• Integrated with existing authentication for secure, frictionless use

🚚 The Result

What once took a full day now takes less than 20 minutes - with very little need for manual intervention.

Not only has this freed up valuable admin time, but it has also reduced fleet costs by approximately 12.5%.

For this client, that equates to a saving of over £36,000 per year – all by streamlining one process with a custom-built, fully integrated tool.

🔄 What’s Next

We’re now exploring how to apply this same routing logic inside the warehouse - helping to optimise picking routes and further increase operational efficiency!

💡 Key Takeaway

This project is a clear example of how custom software, paired with the right tools, can transform long, manual processes into strategic operational gains - without the high costs or limitations of generic solutions.