Berry Bros. & Rudd has a rich 325 year heritage. Founded in 1698, they are Britain’s oldest wine and spirits merchant. Still family-owned and run, the company trades from its original shop, No.3 St James’s Street, though also now has offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo. With longstanding relationships with their producers, Berry Bros. & Rudd help collectors of fine wines and spirits build, manage and enjoy their cellars.
The Challenge
As a high-end wine and spirits merchant, Berry Bros. & Rudd has an elite clientele. While they were using a routing solution for their last mile deliveries, the tracking information for customers was inaccurate and of little use. Given the value they place on customer service, Berry Bros. & Rudd started looking for a new routing and order tracking solution that offered better internal visibility and control with accurate order tracking for customers. In particular, Berry Bros. & Rudd needed a solution that was able to prioritize deliveries of customer owned stock [customer private reserve, CPR] in their own fleet rather than third parties, to guarantee they received a more personal service.
The Solution
After assessing several providers Berry Bros. & Rudd chose DispatchTrack due to the superior flexibility, visibility and control the solution gave them. In particular the ability for DispatchTrack to take custom inputs and custom tags meant Berry Bros. & Rudd would be able to identify their CPR customers and prioritize their deliveries via their own vehicle fleet rather than to a third party provider.
They were also impressed with the automated routing capabilities of the DispatchTrack solution, including its speed, and the ease at which routes can be manually adjusted as circumstances required.
On implementing DispatchTrack, Berry Bros. & Rudd found they were able to streamline the way they pick orders for their vans in their warehouse, enabling drivers to get out earlier and spend more of their day delivering rather than loading and also reducing the need for temporary staff to process orders. Using DispatchTrack, Berry Bros. & Rudd now have the ability to route for two days in advance rather than one. This means if a van isn’t full they are able to pull forward orders from the next day to fill up a van’s capacity. This has enabled them to become more efficient by fully utilizing their vans and reducing
the need to sort orders prior to packing vans.
The use of order tags providing the ability to see and filter different orders and customer types on routing screens has been another significant benefit. This has helped Berry Bros. & Rudd to substantially improve the percentage of their CPR customers who get their orders delivered in their own vans.
The Results
- DispatchTrack has enabled Berry Bros. & Rudd to streamline their operations through better visibility and more control over what they are putting onto their vans, freeing up driver and warehouse time, and reducing the need for temporary staff.
- Since implementing DispatchTrack, Berry Bros. & Rudd have seen several measurable benefits including:
- Contributed towards their best ever NPS score, with customers highlighting the delivery experience and improved accuracy on delivery arrival times as a key factor behind the improved scores.
- Over the Christmas peak Berry Bros. & Rudd saw a 13% increase in van utilization, which, in turn, reduced the amount of orders they had to offload to third parties, therefore reducing costs.
- In December 2023 the customer service team saw 40% less “where’s my order” queries with an overall reduction in total customer queries of 30%.
- Over the 2023 Christmas peak, Berry Bros. & Rudd doubled the number of CPR stock being delivered via their own fleet to 61% and are currently operating at 75-80%.
