Bed company Dreams has boosted the efficiency of its home deliverys using Paragon HDS.

With 6,000 deliveries a week, Dreams uses  Paragon Home Delivery System to plan all its nationwide routes and schedules from its head  office.

The system provides a selection of optimised delivery days and customers choose the one that suits them at the point of sale or when they make an online  purchase.

 “When a Dreams customer buys a bed our Microsoft  Dynamics NAV system will calculate the earliest availability for the product,” says Ian Clarke, change controller at Dreams. 

"This information feeds through to Paragon HDS, which then works out the  available delivery dates to offer the customer.

"The information is presented  graphically to our sales staff in red, amber and green, with green being the  most efficient delivery.

 “We offer customers the ability to book a delivery up to 90  days in advance if they require it; typically most choose between 10 and 15 days  after making a purchase.

"We also have much more flexibility to move deliveries around if we need to and we can close off routes earlier.

"In fact, with the latest version of the software we can also shut off a depot early and we can pause specific routes, if necessary to maximise efficiency.”

To  cover the whole of the UK, Dreams currently operates eight home delivery depots,  with its ninth depot opening soon. The new depot will be in Scotland.

The  deliveries are made using the company’s fleet of 100 x 3.5 tonne Mercedes Sprinter vans.

“Paragon HDS completely eliminates all manual  elements from our delivery planning,” says Clarke. 

"It gives us much tighter control of how  many vans we need and the number of driver shifts required to achieve the plan. 

"Together with our stock availability system, we have a much clearer view of our  supply chain as we can plan when goods need to be in the depots and we’re now  running some as stockless, having just the items they need to deliver within the  next 48 hours."

Seamless integration with the GPS  vehicle tracking units in the vans using Paragon Fleet Controller allows the  system to monitor delivery progress in real-time.

This provides a live report  feed, which is published on the Dreams intranet to show how deliveries are  progressing and allows customer services to keep customers updated with ETAs. 

They can see the exact status of each delivery, whether the van is at the  customer’s home or has completed the delivery and is on its way to the next  drop.