Wholesale software
Six vans. Two temperatures. One round.
Produce distribution has to plan the van before it plans the road: what's chilled, what's ambient, what day this customer takes, and what a small drop actually costs to make.
Produce distribution software plans a day's deliveries across the vans a wholesaler actually owns. It splits drops between chilled and ambient compartments, holds each customer's own delivery days and windows, and sequences the stops in driving order. Market Run builds this automatically from that day's priced orders, against 81 delivery rules found live in one wholesaler's own book.
A general delivery planner moves boxes from a depot to an address. Produce distribution is a narrower problem with sharper edges. The same van carries chilled and ambient stock at once, most customers only take deliveries on set days, and a stop three doors down the road still costs a full stop's worth of driver time if the round is not built to know that.
How the round gets built
- 01Every priced order for the day joins the plan, with its weight, its temperature and its window.
- 02Each van's chilled and ambient compartments are loaded to what they can actually carry - not an assumed split.
- 03A customer's own delivery days are held, not guessed at. Tuesday and Friday stay Tuesday and Friday.
- 04The stop order is sequenced for the road the driver will actually drive - not the order the orders arrived in.
- 05Eighty-one delivery rules were found live in one wholesaler's own history, with thirty-eight more proposed. Almost none of them were written down anywhere before this.
Why a small drop is the hard part
A large order pays for the stop it takes. A small one - two boxes, one thin margin, a customer who orders like this every week - can cost more in driver time and mileage than it earns. Nobody notices until the round is already built around it. The plan a wholesaler sees before the van leaves shows the stop, its window and its place in the driving order. That way the decision is made by a person looking at the whole round, not discovered after the fact.
Plainly
What it will not do on its own
- It does not own or lease the vans. It plans the round for the fleet already on your yard.
- It will not invent a compartment split it has not been told. Chilled and ambient capacity are set for each van, not assumed.
- It does not renegotiate a customer's delivery day. It holds the days and windows already agreed with them.
- It will not quietly drop a stop to make a round fit. One that won't fit is flagged for a person to move.
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Questions people ask
- What is produce distribution software?
- It plans a day's deliveries across the vehicles a wholesaler actually owns. It splits drops between chilled and ambient compartments, holds each customer's own delivery days and windows, and sequences the stops in driving order - instead of leaving it to a whiteboard.
- Does it plan chilled and ambient loads in the same van?
- Yes. Each vehicle's chilled and ambient capacity is entered separately. A van with no chiller is never given a chilled stop, and a full chilled compartment stops taking more chilled weight.
- Can it work around fixed delivery days?
- Yes. A customer's own delivery days and windows are held as their own rule and respected in every round, rather than assumed to be whatever day suits the van.
- What happens if an order comes in after the round is planned?
- It can still join a round that has not yet left, without disturbing the pick already done for the rest of that round.
Give us one night.
Send us one evening's orders. We run the night next to you. In the morning you compare the two.