How Barnies Foods cut product wastage by 30% with RouteMagic
A family-owned bakery and fresh food distributor operating a fleet of 10 vans across East Anglia leverages demand forecasting to optimise daily production.
- 30% reduction in product wastage
- 25% increase in daily sales
- 10 vans tracked in East Anglia
- 20+ Yrs of family-owned operations
Inside Barnies Foods.
Barnies is a family-owned and run business, established over 20 years ago. The business has grown from a single van delivering bakery, sandwich, and pastry goods to local establishments, to a fleet of 10 purpose-built vans covering most of East Anglia. They offer cakes, filled sandwiches, rolls, baguettes, salads, and savouries baked and produced by themselves, serving corner shops, convenience stores, and garages.
High wastage on short shelf-life stock.
Inefficient route scheduling and lack of sales data caused excess returns and manual invoicing delays.
Barnies wanted to streamline route planning to prevent excessive or insufficient stock and avoid the wastage of their short shelf-life fresh products. They required a solution to optimise their call scheduling process, ensuring that the appropriate call-cycles allowed stores to remain adequately stocked with minimum waste returns.
Given that most of their products are freshly baked and have a short shelf life, understanding the sell-through rate was vital to avoid excessive inventory. Additionally, sales representatives relied on manual duplicate books for invoicing, wasting hours writing up sales that had to be duplicated in the office.
- Product wastage due to difficulties in understanding real-time sell-through rates.
- Lack of visibility into demand patterns to guide bakery production planning.
- Time-consuming manual invoicing leading to administrative duplication.
- Inflexible call scheduling that failed to match store restocking cycles.
Forecasting and Mobile Invoicing.
Implementing RouteMagic’s driver app for call scheduling, demand prediction, and digital invoicing.
By utilising the RouteMagic driver app, the sales team can manage and record visits directly on their handheld devices. The office team monitors and manages all scheduled calls for each representative, ensuring regular visits to designated stores.
RouteMagic provides Barnies with valuable historical sales data to predict demand patterns for each convenience store. Combined with shelf space optimisation and real-time visibility across vans and warehouses, the team can align production, prevent stockouts, and eliminate paper-based invoicing.
- Advanced demand forecasting predicting order patterns using historical data.
- Shelf space optimisation algorithms to align stock levels at each location.
- Real-time inventory visibility across vans and warehouses to prevent stockouts.
- Route optimisation factoring in customer locations and delivery time windows.
- Mobile invoicing to generate digital receipts on-site and sync instantly with the office.
30% less waste, 25% sales growth.
A streamlined supply chain, automated admin, and fresh products delivered on time.
By optimising their route planning and managing shelf space with RouteMagic, Barnies achieved a 30% reduction in product wastage and a 25% increase in daily sales. The availability of fresh products on shelves has improved customer satisfaction and repeat purchases.
Removing the reliance on manual paper-based systems has made the business significantly more efficient. Sales representatives can now service more customers each day while saving hours of administrative duplication in the office, building a more profitable supply chain.
| Outcome | Before RouteMagic | With RouteMagic |
|---|---|---|
| Product wastage | High (due to short shelf-life) | 30% reduction |
| Daily sales volume | Restricted by manual routing | 25% increase |
| Invoicing process | Manual duplicate books, office re-entry | Instant digital invoice on driver app |
| Inventory planning | Estimated guess based on returns | Historical demand forecasting |
| Daily admin duplication | Multiple hours of manual filing | Fully automated sync |
RouteMagic’s demand forecasting and route optimisation changed how we work. We cut our fresh product wastage by 30% and grew sales by 25%. Our drivers save hours of invoicing time, and our office has full, live visibility.
The RouteMagic modules powering Barnies Foods.
Connected tools for scheduling, forecasting, mobile sales, and route optimisation.
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