Giant Eagle Runs Private Fleet

Giant Eagle Inc., which currently ranks number 28 on Forbes magazine's largest private corporations list, is one of the nation's largest food retailers and food distributors with more than $5.2 billion in annual sales. Founded in 1931, Giant Eagle, Inc. has grown to be the number one supermarket retailer in their region with 138 corporate and 81 independently owned and operated stores throughout western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and Maryland. The food retailer operates a private fleet comprised of 232 power units and approximately 700 trailers (350 dry vans and 350 refrigerated vehicles).

After determining that the organization needed to implement a technology solution to improve the efficiency and productivity of its private fleet, Giant Eagle developed a vision of the ideal system that included the following key criteria:

• The solution had to be paperless and have the ability to deliver information about every aspect of the fleet in real time.
• The system needed to offer the capability to share information throughout the entire supply chain, manage driver resources and track assets.
• The company also wanted the ability to measure its Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in real time to drive smarter decisions.

Giant Eagle found the “visibility tool” that could tie all of its systems together and provide real-time information in TMWSuite. The company began implementing the software in October 2004 by defining and establishing benchmarks for the “perfect delivery” – creating a baseline from which to compare all performance metrics.

Giant Eagle also implemented ResultsNow by TMW^TM, a web-based performance monitoring application that automates the process of measuring metrics. The company defined the KPIs it believes are crucial to improving productivity and lowering overhead expenses – which are so critical to enhancing profitability in the razor-thin-margin grocery business. These KPIs include idle time, dock waiting and delivery times, on-time percentage, accidents and speeding incidents and cases shipped.

“ResultsNow provides us with a tremendous amount of timely, actionable information,” said William Parry, Vice President of Logistics. “We now have visibility across our entire fleet, enabling our transportation managers to become much more proactive rather than reactive in impacting our performance.”

By integrating the information from the QUALCOMM on-board computers in every vehicle into TMWSuite, Giant Eagle has instant visibility to a host of productivity information for its fleet. This has enabled the company to engineer labor standards and assign a time component to each element of a scheduled run based on such factors as traffic, road conditions and dock waiting time. Now, Giant Eagle has instant access to the actual delivery details versus these defined standards and can quickly make any necessary adjustments if there are any unforeseen delays.

The visibility provided by TMWSuite has had an immediate and measurable impact on Giant Eagle’s performance, including:

• A 25% reduction in idle time – which has translated into a significant savings in fuel costs
• An 8% decrease in the number of deadhead miles

“TMWSuite has heightened everyone’s awareness of our important metrics and how we’re performing, and that has led to tangible results,” concluded Parry.