Potager City
Potager City, a French company providing fruit and vegetable basket preparation and delivery services, has chosen the TourSolver solution to optimize its delivery service for more than 100,000 customers across France.
Presentation
Potager City is a Lyon company that prepares and delivers fruit and vegetable baskets to individuals in search of quality and practicality. By partnering with responsible market gardeners and arboricultors, the French player favours local agriculture and as much as possible organic producers. The baskets are distributed from Monday to Friday at two types of delivery points: at local merchants and at partner companies.
Key Figures
- Founded in 2007 in Lyon;
- more than 5,500 available pickup points;
- baskets delivered to 350 cities in France;
- 100,000 customers trust it;
- over 1,000,000 baskets prepared in 2021
- a network of more than 750 local producers, market gardeners and arboriculturists partners;
- 200 employees at Potager City.
The challenge
Continuously re-plan and optimize delivery routes
Since the company was founded in 2007, its reputation and the interest of the French people to eat healthily and consume locally have contributed to the strong growth of its activity. Driven by this development, the company is expanding its services in new cities, at the same time as new relay points are regularly opening on national territory. To support this expansion, the teams at Potager City had to manually reorganise the delivery service schedules several times. A real headache, especially when we know that each tour must take into account both the location of delivery points and the opening and closing times of the shops and companies of the network.
Customers, on the other hand, need to receive reliable notifications that inform them in real time of the availability of their shopping cart at relay points. Without specific tracking equipment, however, it is difficult for the Potager City teams to provide this visibility to customers in a reliable way.
The company has therefore decided to look for a tool that not only allows it to optimize its internal logistics, but also to facilitate the realization and monitoring of its deliveries.
The solution from Nomadia
The fruit and vegetable preparation and delivery department calls for tenders in 2020 to find a route optimization provider, after which it selects Nomadia and its solution TourSolver.
With TourSolver, SaaS solution for optimization and tracking of logistics routes, The Potager City operations teams can now easily design and execute optimal route plans, taking into account all its business constraints. Once optimized, the tours and the various associated delivery cards are sent directly to the deliverers via the mobile application of the solution.
With its many features, the mobile app has quickly become an indispensable tool for delivery people in the field. In addition to accessing the day’s delivery information, the deliverer can easily geolocate a delivery site’s access point and save it from within the app. This feature is particularly useful for complex delivery sites, such as business districts like La Défense, and makes future deliveries more reliable.
“TourSolver is exactly what we were looking for. The time constraints of each delivery point are taken into account in the solution. Our delivery people are accompanied at every stage of the journey thanks to the mobile application, which ensures a seamless supply chain. With real-time tracking, we can validate the quality of each tour. If anything happens, our teams can easily manage it and communicate with our delivery people as well as our customers.
Tours
Best quality tours
Pick up points
+500 new pick-up points
“TourSolver simplifies the preparation of tours by facilitating the integration of new delivery points, each with its own constraints regarding opening hours or geographical location. Thanks to the solution, all these constraints are automatically taken into account in the calculation of the tours, no matter how many deliveries to make. For us, it’s a real gain in peace.”
Reliable tours for financial and ecological gains
Nomadia is helping Potager City grow. With the rapid expansion of its activity, both geographically, with the opening of new delivery areas and in terms of new customers, the company could no longer afford to keep frozen routes. By continuously adapting the tours and optimising the routes of the delivery people, Potager City has already been able to reduce the number of trucks on the road and lower costs. In addition to the significant productivity gains made by field delivery workers, the TourSolver quickly saved the operations teams valuable time when organizing tours.
The expansion of the densely populated Paris region reflects the particularly positive impact of the adoption of the solution TourSolver.
“We were able to launch 500 new points of withdrawal in 6 months in the Ile-de-France region. This is an important reorganisation work, as the logistics teams had to reassemble the entire logistics architecture of the tours, each with optimization points.”
Customers of Potager City also reap many benefits. Thanks to the tracking features of the mobile application, the customer is kept informed in real time of the status of his delivery. The sales administration unit is also permanently connected to the activity. If a delay is detected, she can easily communicate with the delivery people and anticipate the customer interactions.
In the midst of a health crisis, a SaaS solution that can manage the logistics of any post has proved crucial. Thanks to the implementation of TourSolver in fall 2020, The teams at Potager City were able to manage the hazards of the second lockdown more easily and faster, a real difference compared to the first lockdown where they were not yet equipped with the solution. In the event of a problem in one region, the delivery service could be managed remotely by another region: a particularly decisive reactivity that allowed to ensure continuous service to customers despite the crisis.
The impact of route optimization at Potager City is not only financial but also ecological. By reducing the number of kilometres travelled, the company has been able to reduce its vehicles’ CO2 emissions and thus its environmental footprint. The company is also committed to CSR and plans to raise awareness among its customers on these issues by communicating to them the percentage of emission reduction achieved through local consumption and geographical optimisation of routes. In addition, the 100% software and mobile solution has eliminated the use of paper, thus accelerating dematerialization at Potager City, a real benefit for the environment and employees working from home.
“With the explosion of e-commerce, Potager City continues to grow. Home delivery and Saturday are already under consideration. TourSolver is a solid tool to address these new challenges.
