supply chain

Bakery Borgesius

An optimal range of delicious fresh bread is available at opening time in all supermarkets – around 1,000 stores – supplied by the Borgesius bakery company. This is made possible by Borgesius’ extremely sophisticated transport operation to deliver the ordered bakery products every night/morning. Logistics Manager Leon den Boer explains how this daily task is managed, and the role that Simacan’s Control Tower plays. “The punctuality of deliveries has increased by 10% since we started using it.”

Bakery Borgesius at a glance

Every day, Borgesius supplies approximately 800,000 bakery products to Dutch supermarkets from its nine bakeries
With Simacans help the company arranges the transport itself, from six regional locations throughout the Netherlands
Borgesius supplies approximately 1,000 stores daily, with a fleet of around 190 lorries

Direct store deliveries

Few people have heard of this bakery company, despite its 125-year existence, but millions of people enjoy its fresh products every day. From wholewheat bread to white rolls, and from currant loaves to pastries – everything is produced to order the day before and delivered to the store at night or early in the morning. “We are one of the few suppliers who deliver directly to stores,” says Den Boer. “In fact, this is a huge operation every day. Bread is an emotional product that people go to the supermarket for especially. Our products must therefore be fresh on the shelves when a store opens.”

Complex logistics puzzle

Borgesius is a family business with nine production locations spread throughout the Netherlands. The daily trips to all store branches are centrally planned, but coordinated from six regional production locations. These are ultimately responsible for deliveries and returns/packaging collection in their region, and they either have their own means of transport or work with logistics service providers. Den Boer: “This is quite a complex puzzle. You have to deal with all kinds of restrictions, such as zero-emission zones and specific delivery conditions per store. We’re not allowed to deliver to some branches until an hour before opening, whereas we can deliver to others in the middle of the night. We do more trips on Fridays and Saturdays than during the week, and on Sundays we have to take different opening hours into account.”

Punctuality and transparency

The three most important key performance indicators for Borgesius are punctuality, completeness, and transparency. “The most important thing, of course, is that we have delivered the bakery products as ordered to all store branches before opening time every day. We currently have a service level of 99.3% to 99.5%. We are also expected to accurately inform branches about our arrival time. We have been using Simacan’s Control Tower for that for a few years now. The big advantage of this is that store employees no longer have to call us in the morning to ask where their bread is. Thanks to the Simacan ‘arrival’ monitors, they can see that it is on its way. Our customers – the supermarkets – also use this solution for their own transport operations.”

Live track & trace for all stakeholders

At Borgesius, the Simacan platform runs in combination with the trip planning system. As soon as the production locations have approved the daily trips, they are transferred to Simacan and are made visible for customers, the store branches and the logistics service providers. The latter also receive the information via the trip planning package and can then assign the right trucks and drivers. With Simacan, everyone – including the carriers themselves – can monitor the transport progress. The estimated times of arrival (ETAs) are updated in real time based on the position of the truck, the stops still to be made, and the current traffic situation.

Continuous improvement of transport process

Simacan facilitates visibility and communication during the trip. An additional advantage is that the stakeholders can also review how things went afterwards, as the basis for improvements. “The logistics managers at the production locations can monitor a logistics service provider’s performance and analyse why delays occur,” says Den Boer. “If a branch receives its delivery late, you want to know the reason why – especially if it happens frequently. For example, maybe the route is suboptimal and it would be better to plan branches in a different order. It is also possible that a driver loses a lot of time at a retail location if roll containers are in the way, for example. Whatever it is, everyone is looking at the same data, so there can be no arguments about that.”

"Everyone is looking at the same data, so there can be no arguments about that.”

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Logistics KPIs are increasing

Borgesius has been working with Simacan for about two years now and sees its KPIs moving in the right direction, according to the logistics manager. “One important KPI for us is transparency, or the percentage of transport movements that we can monitor in real time in the Control Tower. This percentage is currently at 84% because we’re not yet receiving the right data from all carriers. This is still a bit of a hassle; some work with onboard computers, others with driver apps. But fortunately, the data is becoming increasingly complete. The punctuality of our deliveries has also increased considerably. The percentage of orders that are delivered at the scheduled time, within a margin of 15 minutes, is now 90%. That’s 10% higher than two years ago.”;

Better decisions thanks to data

How does he see the future? Does he expect to be able to further improve on-time store deliveries, perhaps to above 99%, just like the service levels? Den Boer: “As data completeness increases, we will have even more insight into why an agreed time slot is or isn’t met. This also has to do with factors beyond our control, such as unexpected congestion or unscheduled road closures. Sometimes you can minimise the consequences by using extra trucks, but that’s not always ideal. After all, that involves extra costs, plus we all want to become more sustainable. You can make informed decisions about this based on the data.”

Dynamic trip planning

Another potential idea is to make trip planning more dynamic – in other words, to calculate the most optimal trips on a daily basis rather than working with fixed schedules. Den Boer concludes: “This is one of the reasons why, after talking to our customers, we switched to Simacan. If that’s what you want, you need Simacan. We need to look more closely at how exactly this will look and whether we really want it. It certainly has advantages – you can respond better to changes in demand and make optimal use of transport capacity – but there are also disadvantages. If drivers get a different trip every day, that might affect job satisfaction and quality.”

Thanks to Simacan, Borgesius is able to deliver top-class performance every day, and the supermarket branches have real-time insight into the ETAs of their bakery orders. An additional advantage is that the company can continuously improve and make informed decisions about its future transport strategy.

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