Barnies is a family-owned and run business, established over 20 years ago. The business has grown from a small van delivering bakery, sandwich & pastry goods to local establishments, to a small fleet of 10 purpose-built vans that cover most of East Anglia.​

They offer some delicious cakes, filled sandwiches, rolls & Baguettes, salads and savouries all baked and produced by themselves. From small corner shops to large convenience stores and garages, you will find their products around the corner.

Barnies was looking to streamline route planning in order to prevent excessive or insufficient stock to avoid the wastage of their short shelf life products. They required a solution to optimise their call scheduling process, ensuring that the appropriate call-cycles allowed the stores to remain adequately stocked with minimum waste returns.

• Product Wastage: Given that most of their products have a short shelf life and are freshly baked, the primary challenge lies in understanding the sell-through rate and ensuring that convenience store shelves are correctly stocked with their fresh products but without excessive inventory.
• Production Planning: Through better planned route schedules coupled with visible sell-through rates the bakery production could be managed better ensuring higher stock availability. freshness.
• Mobile Invoicing: With sales reps reliant on duplicate books for invoicing they were spending a lot of time writing up each sale and then each transaction was duplicated in the office.

By utilising the RouteMagic van sales mobile app, the sales team can assign their calls directly on their handheld devices. The office team can then monitor and manage all the scheduled calls for each sales representative, ensuring that they are making regular visits to the designated stores. This seamless process allows for effective scheduling and tracking of sales visits, ultimately enhancing productivity and customer engagement.

RouteMagic provides them with valuable sales data from the past, which they can use to adjust their future site visits accordingly.

• Demand Forecasting: RouteMagic utilises advanced analytics to predict demand patterns for each convenience store based on historical data, seasonal variations and market trends.
• Shelf Space Optimisation: Integrated algorithms optimised the allocation of fresh products to each store, ensuring that shelves were neither understocked nor overstocked.
• Real-time Stock Visibility: RouteMagic provided real-time visibility into stock levels across vans and warehouses. This allowed the distributor and manufacturer to optimise inventory management, prevent stockouts, and reduce excess inventory.
• Route Optimisation: RouteMagic incorporated route optimisation algorithms that considered factors such as customer locations, delivery time windows, and traffic conditions. This helped create efficient routes, minimise travel time, and optimise customer coverage.
• Sales Performance Tracking: RouteMagic offered comprehensive sales reporting capabilities, allowing the distributor and manufacturer to track sales performance in real-time. This provided insights into product performance, customer preferences, and sales trends for informed decision-making.
• Data Analytics Dashboard: A user-friendly dashboard offered comprehensive insights into sales performance, inventory levels, and route efficiency, empowering decision-makers with actionable data.

By optimising their route planning process and effectively managing shelf space with RouteMagic, the team achieved significant benefits in terms of reduced wastage, increased sales and improved customer satisfaction. RouteMagic’s advanced features and functionalities enabled the supplier to streamline their operations, resulting in a more efficient supply chain and ultimately a more profitable business.

• Enhanced inventory management: The real-time visibility of inventory levels allowed Barnies to monitor stock levels accurately. This, combined with demand forecasting capabilities, enabled them to ensure that the right amount of products reached the stores at the right time, reducing wastage and stockouts.
• Increased sales: With optimised route planning and improved shelf space management, the customer experienced increased sales. The availability of products on the shelves led to improved customer satisfaction and repeat purchases.
• Reduced wastage: RouteMagic’s demand forecasting capabilities, combined with optimised route planning, significantly reduced product wastage. The customer was able to deliver fresh products with longer shelf life, minimising expired products and associated losses.
• Greater Efficiency: Removing the reliance on manual and paper-based systems has made the business more efficient and allowed reps to service more customers each day and save hours of office duplication.