Dreams enables 6000 home deliveries a week with Paragon software

Dreams, the bed experts, has boosted the efficiency of its home deliveries with Paragon’s Home Delivery System (HDS).

With 6000 deliveries a week, Dreams uses Paragon HDS to plan all its nationwide routes and schedules from its head office. The system provides a selection of optimised delivery days and customers choose the one that suits them at the point of sale or when they make an online purchase.

"When a Dreams customer buys a bed our Microsoft Dynamics NAV system will
calculate the earliest availability for the product. This information feeds
through to Paragon HDS, which then works out the available delivery dates
to offer the customer. The information is presented graphically to our
sales staff in red, amber and green, with green being the most efficient
delivery," says Ian Clarke, Change Controller, Dreams.

"We offer customers the ability to book a delivery up to 90 days in
advance if they require it; typically most choose between 10 and 15 days after
making a purchase. We also have much more flexibility to move deliveries
around if we need to and we can close off routes earlier. In fact, with the
latest version of the software we can also shut off a depot early and we can
pause specific routes, if necessary to maximise efficiency."

To cover the whole of the UK, Dreams currently operates eight home
delivery depots, with its ninth depot opening soon. The new depot will be in
Scotland. The deliveries are made using the company’s fleet of 100 x 3.5 tonne
Mercedes Sprinter vans.

"Paragon HDS completely eliminates all manual elements from our delivery
planning. It gives us much tighter control of how many vans we need and the
number of driver shifts required to achieve the plan. Together with our
stock availability system, we have a much clearer view of our supply chain as
we can plan when goods need to be in the depots and we’re now running some
as stockless, having just the items they need to deliver within the next 48
hours," says Ian Clarke.

Seamless integration with the GPS vehicle tracking units in the vans using
Paragon Fleet Controller allows the system to monitor delivery progress in
real-time. This provides a live report feed, which is published on the Dreams intranet to show how deliveries are progressing and allows customer services to keep customers updated with ETAs. They can see the exact status of each delivery, whether the van is at the customer’s home or has completed the delivery and is on its way to the next drop.