New Castle Building Products lowers fuel costs

Descartes Systems Group announced that New Castle Building Products has reduced its fleet mileage by approximately 25,000 miles annually using Descartes’ route planning and execution solution. By replacing manual planning with data-driven routing, New Castle has lowered fuel consumption and costs, improved route consistency and accuracy and enhanced on-time delivery performance, helping the company meet rising customer expectations while operating a more efficient and scalable distribution network.

“Serving customers across the Northeastern U.S. through a network that spans New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Maryland we manage a large fleet with complex multi-stop routes, variable jobsite constraints and tight delivery windows,” said Keith Haskell, COO at New Castle Building Products. “Before Descartes, route planning was much more manual and decentralized, making it difficult to consistently optimize deliveries across locations. As demand increased, we needed a smarter way to improve planning efficiency and control costs without compromising service standards. With Descartes, we’ve been able to take approximately 25,000 miles out of our routes annually while improving delivery reliability and ensuring our customers get what they need, when they need it.”

Descartes’ route planning and execution platform helps building supply distributors manage the complexity of last mile delivery where high-value materials, specialized handling and tight delivery commitments are the norm. The solution enables more centralized and consistent dispatch operations across locations, while dynamically optimizing routes based on real-world constraints, such as delivery windows, vehicle capacity and traffic. This helps ensure efficient delivery execution while keeping contractor jobs on schedule. It also maximizes route density and vehicle capacity use to increase deliveries per route without increasing fleet size, and provides end-to-end visibility to drive continuous fleet performance improvement, higher productivity, lower fuel consumption and reduced emissions.

“Fuel is one of the largest and most volatile expenses in fleet operations, especially for building materials distributors managing multi-stop job site deliveries,” said James Wee, General Manager, Fleet Management at Descartes. “With more intelligent routing and better visibility into daily operations, companies can reduce unnecessary miles and fuel consumption, centralize dispatch operations across locations, and improve overall fleet performance, all of which helps to keep customers’ construction projects on schedule.”