Europa Worldwide Group, one of the UK’s largest privately-owned freight forwarding and logistics companies, has selected Paragon’s routing and scheduling software to streamline its transport management and support business growth. The software has been implemented at the company’s Dartford facility, the UK’s largest European groupage hub, to automate the route planning process for a fleet of 30 plus rigid and artic HGVs that handle groupage and full-load deliveries nationwide.
“Following our ambitious restructuring in 2013, turnover has almost doubled and organic growth across the business is currently running at 20 per cent, so we need to ensure we have the appropriate processes in place to support our continued expansion,” explains Richard Litchfield, Group IT Director of Europa Worldwide Group. “We are committed to utilising industry-leading technologies, to help our road freight operation to achieve the highest levels of responsiveness, efficiency and productivity. We develop many of our systems in-house, but we quickly recognised that routing and scheduling is a hugely complicated and very specific area of expertise, so we chose to work with Paragon based on their excellent reputation in the industry.”
Paragon’s routing and scheduling software will initially be used to maximise use of Europa’s rigid commercial vehicles based in London and the south east of England, before being expanded to incorporate the artic lorries that operate across the UK. It will replace a previous manual process that was hugely time-consuming and required constant refining throughout the day as orders came in. This approach made it difficult to handle day-to-day variances in demand as well as tackle the challenge of difficult traffic conditions.
The software will be integrated with Europa’s in-house IT system, Leonardo, which has been developed to provide customers with the highest levels of visibility and control of their shipments. Europa will benefit from sharing operational data across the business to simplify and streamline the management of transport requirements.
“Moving forward we expect to take advantage of the strategic planning and KPI reporting functionality available within Paragon’s software to target continuous improvement, especially during any future acquisitions. We also have plans to roll out the route planning software to our network of 10 UK branches, as well as integrate it with our vehicle tracking system, so we can compare planned versus actual performance in real-time,” adds Litchfield.
William Salter, Managing Director of Paragon Software Systems said: “We are working closely with fast-growing companies such as Europa to help them overcome many of the business and operational transport challenges they face. Paragon’s routing and scheduling software not only enables our customers to make better use of transport planners to target efficiency and productivity improvements, but also ensures they are best prepared for future developments and expansion.”
