The level of activity in the direct store delivery and route accounting systems market seems to be at an all time high. People who are not automated are looking at automation, and long time users are now looking at “the next step.” The interesting bit is that this year has made virtually everyone look at protecting their businesses against business inefficiencies that are amplified by changing economic decisions. If nothing else, this year has been a wakeup call to many in the food and beverage industry to take care of some of the easy laziness that develops over time and run more efficient route businesses.
One of the trends over the last few weeks in this blog has been how to grind more sales out of the existing operation. This week I don’t have any leading advice or best practices to share but I wanted to talk a bit about the act of measurement itself. Everyone talks about KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics. Everyone has their favorite number that they like to share. One of the things that is often overlooked is the physical mechanism used to capture the metric and whether or not it is a direct result of the activity you are trying to measure or simply an interesting parallel number. Counting the number of chickens on an egg farm is not a good measure of egg production, it is a good measure of potential producers. You really need to be looking at the number of eggs per chicken or something along those lines.
Direct store delivery does not have a standard that can be referenced. Cases per mile is only good if everyone runs the same number of miles and has a similar account base. What is interesting is the change in the measure itself (damn calculus). Acceleration is the rate in change of speed (the first derivative of speed for math nuts). We can capture a lot of great static data in the route world that is similar to measuring the speed of a car. I think we get into some really interesting measures when we start looking at the rate of change in those metrics. That rate of change gives you a much more applicable metric to apply to all routes because it rules out the geographic specific pieces of the measure. Now we just have to figure out how to do it …
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