Customer Delivery Operations
Background:
Grocery Gateway was founded in 1997, by Bill Ni Nardo. In 2001, Grocery Gateway was Canada’s largest direct online grocer, providing a selection of 6,500 items from the GroceryGateway.com website.
Nature of the Business: Grocery Gateway offers food products with a delivery service competing in the grocery industry. The service is offered to residents in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), which is the largest urban area in Canada.
Current Market Strategy: Grocery Gateways offers a 90-minute delivery window from 6:30am to 10:30 pm. The service provides a doorstep delivery service for maximum convenience, with the customer in mind. Statement from Claude Germain chief operating officer: “We Focus on low cost, high service logistics execution in one market. Some people focus on technology, others on merchandising, but right from the get go we focused on logistics execution. We wanted to get it right and have the lowest cost capability with the best service we could provide. “(pg.2,Johnson).
Problem Statement: The present problem is that Dominique Van Voorhis, Vice President of industrial engineering and operation for Grocery Gateway needs to develop recommendations aimed at improving delivery operations at the weekly meeting in seven days.
Sub-Problems:
* Grocery Gateways has only been able to achieve 2.7 stops per hour. Falling shy of their aimed 4 stops per hour.
Organization Objectives: With the stated problem in delivery time, Dominque Van Voorhis needs to increase driver stops within the hour. Grocery Gateway also wants to decrease the delivery windows from 90minutes to 30minutes. They want to initiate a 10 minutes of contact time with the customer and a 5 minute drive between customers, taking in consideration of residential speed laws.
SWOT Analysis:
Strengths:
* Customer time saver- The efficient service saves time for the customer. Typically the average GTA resident