Sainsbury’s in the United Kingdom managed 2,000 fewer empty-vehicle journeys in a week, with the help of fleet management software from Paragon Software Systems
“About 15 years ago, we started offering transport collaboration, in which we’ll partner with a retailer’s fleet to help us accommodate the return of our assets — pallets, containers and crates — back from the retailer to a CHEP service center. This has helped retailers fill empty miles while also utilizing their driver hours,” he explains.
Now CHEP is taking this idea a step further by offering what it calls transport orchestration or lane matching. “We started this in Europe and are now translating it to North America,” says Brehovsky. With transport orchestration, CHEP leverages the scale and density of its network, along with the data that scale enables, to identify matching partners in the industry to help build closed loops to facilitate the movement of each other’s products.
“So, if there’s a customer that’s moving product from Atlanta to Orlando, and they have empty miles coming back, we will find a comparable customer that’s shipping product, and we’ll match them,” he explains.
CHEP relies on its sister company, BXB Digital, to analyze the vast amount of data from its customers and develop actionable insights for these programs, continues Brehovsky. Meanwhile, since customer data privacy is of the upmost importance to the companies, CHEP gains permission from its customers upfront to participate.
To accelerate the evolution of its transport orchestration program, CHEP recently launched a bold new program, Zero Waste World. The program aims to use the power of CHEP’s logistics network to help its customers find new ways to tackle three shared challenges: eradicating empty miles, eliminating waste and cutting out inefficiencies.
“We hope to build a collaboration platform within the industry in order to facilitate effective matching between customers to solve for things like capacity, restraints in transportation, and to connect unlikely parties that normally wouldn’t be talking to each other,” says Brehovsky.
CHEP’s vast reach in the North American market includes around 14,000 manufacturing locations and more than 19,000 retail locations.