QSTA is a new online marketplace for food professionals and acts as a distribution platform for new food concepts. The food professional orders from QSTA and QSTA delivers it itself, the next morning, to the food professional's doorstep. With its platform, QSTA focuses mainly on distributing new and unique products.
Products that you do not buy on a pallet from traditional food wholesalers (e.g. Sligro and Hanos). Food professionals easily order these products in desired, and therefore smaller quantities, from QSTA from different distributors. This also gives local food suppliers a platform with a large network of food professionals.
"RouteLogic saves us a lot of time, I think the savings are around 70%"
- Rian Faaij (Digital marketing director QSTA)
This business model provides a unique interpretation of the last mile, or delivery process. The last mile pursued by QSTA depends on two conditions.
- Calculating the optimal load factor of delivery vans.
- Simply planning routes as quickly as possible
Calculating the optimal load factor of delivery vans
To be able to take away as many orders as possible by van, efficient loading of the vans is desirable. In this way, QSTA ensures the highest possible load factor and sustainable transport. This is because products are ordered at package level, so there is fine-meshed distribution. In a paper process, it is far from always feasible to achieve the optimal load factor of the delivery vans.
Planning as quickly and easily as possible
Easy ordering and daily delivery is what consumers are used to from B2C platforms. In the professional world, you see it much less. Yet for the food professional, QSTA thinks it should be very common. That is why food professionals can order from QSTA until 6pm, to be delivered the next day. As a result, QSTA has a relatively short time to plan routes and load the delivery vans.
The planner's desire is to plan as quickly as possible to allow enough time to load the delivery vans. However, time often falls short, as planning with a paper process is very time-consuming for QSTA. Don't forget that load factors also need to be taken into account during this paper planning process.
"Customers can place orders with us until 6pm. Our customers mostly want to be delivered early in the morning. So we need to be able to plan quickly and efficiently"
- René Boonzaaijer (Manager operations)
Continuing growth after a successful first year
After a successful first year, QSTA is starting to run into challenges to continue this unique delivery process and continue their growth. It takes an enormous amount of time to meet the two aforementioned requirements. Thus, the need arose at QSTA to plan automated routes. With stable route optimisation software, allowing QSTA to scale up considerably without any problems.
A successful collaboration with RouteLogic
In the search for a route planning software that met QSTA's needs, they came across RouteLogic. The software takes load factors into account and plans efficiently for the constantly increasing number of delivery vans. In addition, it is easy to adjust van loading routes even further, due to changing orders, for example.
QSTA together with RouteLogic thus plans at least 70% faster, than with the paper process in the old situation. It also saves many hours on the road and precious fuel. We also regularly pull together to build improvements in our cooperation. Which in turn benefits the growth of QSTA and their new initiative for food professionals.
"RouteLogic saves us a lot of time, I think the savings are around 70%"
Rian Faaij (Digital marketing director QSTA)
How QSTA experiences the cooperation with RouteLogic, they tell in the video below
