The Lilydale Instant Lawn team prides themselves on their commitment to extraordinary customer service and being known as the supplier of choice for premium quality Instant Lawn in Australia.
Operating out of three farm locations at Bairnsdale, Pakenham, and Yarra Glen – Lilydale Instant Lawn manages a fleet of over 10 vehicles dedicated to delivering bulk Instant Lawn to over 1,200 locations monthly.
The Challenge
In 2022, Lilydale Instant Lawn began the process of upgrading their legacy IT solutions with the objective of streamlining operations.
NetSuite was selected as the core ERP solution providing sales order entry, purchasing, inventory management, multi-company accounting, and CRM functionalities.
To facilitate successful last-mile delivery experiences for their customers, Lilydale Instant Lawn needed a solution that would integrate with NetSuite and enhance their supply chain performance.
“Our route planning process consisted of manually finding delivery addresses, plotting these dots on a map and figuring routes for each truck. This was inefficient and lacked any ability to scale.”.
Sarah Head - Project Lead
Lilydale’s requirements for their last mile delivery solution included
- Ability to integrate order information directly from NetSuite
- Automated route planning and optimisation considering specific constraints including harvest requirement, customer delivery time windows, changing pallet weights based on rainfall, road networks and the capabilities of their fleet
- Integrated Driver execution apps, and
- Dynamic Customer Notifications that reflected actual arrival times
Lilydale Instant Lawn understood that these capabilities were key to improving their operational performance and customer satisfaction but also had to be delivered through an integrated platform
The Solution
Lilydale Instant Lawn partnered with Bestrane to implement a comprehensive Route Planning, Driver Execution and Customer Notifications solution. This involved integrating solutions from NetSuite, Boomi, The Descartes Systems Group and Glympse.
This cloud-based fleet management solution provides a comprehensive set of functionality including optimised route planning, dispatch, vehicle tracking, proof-of-delivery (POD) and dynamic notifications to end customers, that is fully integrated to NetSuite and maximises customer service and efficiency.
The Descartes OnDemand suite provided a seamless way to optimize delivery performance while considering a broad range of operational and customer requirements with an intuitive user experience. When combined with the Descartes MobileLINK driver application, drivers are also supplied with turn-by-turn navigation, real time order information and other work flow instructions critical to each delivery.
Changes to the daily plan are sent directly to drivers’ devices, with updates made by them including the status of their deliveries and POD’s visible to the planning team in real time.
Lilydale Instant Lawn ‘s customers are also provided with real time updates on their order and delivery using Glympse Customer Notifications.Notifications including the ‘due for delivery the next day’ and a same day ‘enroute’ message are sent direct to the customer's allowing them to track the deliveries and synchronise labour to assist with unloading.
“We have traditionally been very good at achieving our expected delivery times however our customer experience now with our Glympse Customer Notifications has taken us to a whole new level of customer satisfaction”.
Steve Cole - General Manager - Lilydale Instant Lawn Pty Ltd
The Results
Working with Bestrane, Lilydale Instant Lawn and their customers have realised significant benefits including:
Operational:
- Significant reduction in the time taken to plan the delivery routes and manage any exceptions and issues that arise
- Consistent achievement of promised delivery times
- Seamless capture and storage of key proof of delivery information
- Guidance for drivers with turn-by-turn directions, and work flow instructions tailored to the delivery, such as site access policies and other delivery requirements
- Centralised and real-time visibility of all deliveries, and
- Enhanced reporting of key operational metrics including resource utilisation
Financial:
- Direct integration between NetSuite and OnDemand ensuring all orders translate into the correct deliveries and the completed deliveries are reflected in NetSuite for billing purposes
- Reduced distances driven with routes accurately planned through OnDemand
Customer:
Significantly enhanced customer experiences with
- Consistently improved on-time delivery performance
- Direct customer notifications advising of when the order is routed and enroute for final delivery, and
- Enhanced engagement with customers – enabling easier deliveries as they are prepared for the delivery and often out in the street waving the drivers down!
“We’ve had fantastic feedback from customers about being able to see where their delivery truck is”
Sarah Head – Project Lead
