Value City Department Stores has teamed up with Tom Zosel Associates to implement a fleet productivity program designed to improve performance and reduce costs within Value City’s transportation operations.
Over an eight-week period, Tom Zosel Associates—a Chicago, IL-based logistics consulting firm that specializes in optimizing labor performance for fleet drivers—looked into Value City’s delivery procedures and developed labor standards based on engineering techniques that use an automated time study to determine the rate and time required for each delivery activity, including non-drive time.
The standards were used to build a component pay structure for Value City drivers that considers all of the elements that can influence a delivery, such as pre- and post-inspections, delivery times by customer, backhauls by vendor, trailer switches and drop-and-hook.
“We were looking at ways to maximize the utilization of our resources, while being fair to our delivery drivers and maintaining our high standards of service,” said Raymond Shearer, transportation director for Value City. “TZA’s program helped us to use our drivers more efficiently and turned out to be a great success. We have been able to realize annualized savings of $700,000 in labor cost and $265,000 in equipment.”
TZA vp John Platz said, “Typically a company can expect an increase of up to 20% in productivity and considerable savings within the first few weeks of implementation, therefore obtaining a very quick return on investment.”
