Neuca optimises delivery routes to thousands of pharmacies across Poland with the Omecon &UP® platform

What was the goal of implementing the Omecon &UP® platform at Neuca? What are the specifics of the market your company operates in?

Every day, more than 600 vehicles leave our warehouses in the morning bound for pharmacies and other customers, followed by almost 500 more in the afternoon. Between them, we complete up to 12,000 deliveries in the morning and over 5,000 in the afternoon and evening. We often deliver medicines to the same location twice a day. We needed a tool that would let us manage such a large volume of deliveries and our vehicle fleet as efficiently as possible, in terms of both time and cost.

At the same time, the new platform helps us meet our customers’ expectations regarding service quality. What’s specific to the sector we operate in is that pharmacies require deliveries at a specific time, yet the delivery windows are very short — often just a dozen or so minutes.

We have fairly fixed delivery schedules agreed with our customers. Some pharmacies expect our vehicle to arrive with the goods before they even open. That way, the ordered medicines are already in the pharmacy’s system and on the shelves before the first customer walks in.

As pharmacy customers ourselves, we’ve grown used to the idea that if a medicine isn’t in stock, it will appear that same afternoon or the next morning. Pharmacies can respond to patients’ needs this quickly only because pharmaceutical wholesalers — like Neuca — are able to deliver service at such a high level.

We’re able to guarantee up to two deliveries a day. The exceptions may be very small pharmacy outlets or those located in towns far from the main routes.

How do you manage to meet pharmacies’ demanding expectations?

Optimising transport costs on one hand, and guaranteeing customers the delivery times they set on the other, are very difficult to reconcile. In an ideal world, we’d need almost as many vehicles as we have customers, or customers would have to accept unlimited delivery windows. These two things are in direct conflict.

So we have to reconcile fire and water, so to speak — and that’s exactly what the Omecon &UP® platform helps us do. It lets us plan routes sensibly and complete deliveries in line with expectations. This matters all the more because the pharmaceutical wholesale market is highly competitive, with several large players operating in it.

We compete daily, and any deviation from the delivery parameters agreed with a customer is quickly called out. If problems kept recurring, the customer could simply stop ordering from our wholesale business.

You mentioned that you’ve been using a tool to support delivery route planning and optimisation for a long time. What made you migrate to the Omecon &UP® platform two years ago?

As recently as seven years ago, we planned routes manually. It was a tedious, lengthy process that also required a significant number of people. After switching to an IT tool to support this process, we achieved a step change in cost optimisation and service quality. I can’t imagine going back to doing it by hand.

The decision to choose the Omecon &UP® platform two years ago came down mainly to improved ease of use. Our previous tool required a considerable amount of work to prepare the input data. What’s more, even small inaccuracies in the spreadsheets used by that solution could affect the quality of the results — sometimes producing outputs that didn’t fully support the driver route-planning process. The interface itself wasn’t fully intuitive, and using the tool required additional knowledge and experience. It also lacked mechanisms to clearly guide the user through day-to-day work. As a result, individual steps took longer and required extra verification, which slowed down the whole planning process and made it harder to run smoothly.

What benefits have you gained since implementing the Omecon platform?

The most important benefit was how much easier the new solution is to work with. It no longer demands as much attention, precision and time spent preparing data. The process, which used to take half a day, now takes just a dozen or so minutes. The system simply doesn’t allow incorrect information to be entered.

The Omecon platform is also far more intuitive — it’s simply more pleasant to work with. Naturally, it also meets all our other requirements. First, it guarantees delivery at a specific time. Second, it lets us optimise transport costs.

It’s also worth remembering that Neuca operates in a market where margins are regulated by law. So on one hand, we need to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, and on the other, keep costs under control.

On top of that, the migration process itself was straightforward. After Omecon &UP® was implemented, we were trained on its functionality and started using it right away — with our new partner’s support in the early stages.

What does data preparation and day-to-day work with the Omecon &UP® system look like now?

Small changes are made in the new system every day — adding or removing a recipient from a given route, or occasionally adjusting a delivery time window. From time to time we make bigger changes, once enough small ones have accumulated to require a larger correction, sometimes affecting several routes in a given region.

Larger changes are also made whenever a new cross-dock hub is set up in our network, or an existing one changes address. These hubs let us optimise deliveries to pharmacies. For example, goods ordered from our Katowice warehouse travel by truck to the cross-dock hub in Nowy Sącz, where several smaller vehicles distribute them to end customers in that area. That translates into significant savings — as much as around 1,000 km a month on that one route alone.

We also make a major change in the Omecon &UP® system whenever a new pharmacy chain with multiple locations becomes our customer. In that case, we need to recalculate all the routes in the region from scratch. We get several variants, and in the end it’s one of our own employees who picks the best one.

How many people planned routes before a dedicated IT tool was introduced?

Back then, there was no dedicated team. Each regional transport manager would sit down with drivers and sales representatives and plan their routes. It would be hard to even estimate how much effort that required.

When we implemented our first route-optimisation system, the team responsible for this area had 5 people. In the first phase we started planning routes across the whole of Poland, then moved down to the level of the voivodeships and regions served by our 16 warehouses and 26 cross-dock hubs. That process took around six months.

After migrating to the Omecon &UP® platform, that team shrank even further, since the new tool is much simpler and less time-consuming to use.

What criteria do you use when choosing between the route options the platform proposes?

We check how well each option meets the boundary conditions we set — the delivery time windows required by pharmacies — and we assess transport costs. For example, one variant might meet customer expectations to within 30 minutes, another to within 15. In the second step, we compare how that difference affects transport cost.

If an option is both cheaper and better, the choice is obvious. Otherwise, we have to analyse each case individually — and a single route can involve more than 30 customers.

Another important criterion, of course, is the legal limit on driver working hours. Just like fuel cost, the Omecon &UP® platform has to take that into account as well.

Do drivers receive data directly from the Omecon &UP® system?

No. We only send what we call the route sheet — the route for a given day — to their mobile devices. It shows the order and time in which they need to reach each pharmacy location. The same device is used to scan documents and parcels when they’re picked up from the warehouse, and again when they’re delivered to the pharmacy.

Besides the delivery time windows already mentioned, is there anything else specific to the pharmaceutical market that needs to be factored in when planning routes?

Besides our regular customers, we also have customers who order from us occasionally — their appearance on a given day, while not entirely random, can still be a challenge to plan for.

We definitely have to account for the fact that the entrance used for deliveries isn’t always at the address shown on the map. Drivers often need to approach from a different street, or a different one depending on the time of delivery. Delivery point addresses also differ from the registered addresses of specific companies — shopping centres being a typical example. All of this information has to be reflected in the &UP® route planning and optimisation system.