Optimizing STERNE Group’s urban delivery service
The STERNE Group is a major player in the field of urgent and on-demand delivery. Thanks to Kardinal’s software solution, it can optimize the organization of its urban deliveries. Discover the STERNE Group teams’ testimony on how Kardinal was introduced and the everyday benefits.
If you prefer to read the Sterne Group case study summary in pdf, it is here 
About the STERNE Group
The STERNE Group is an international company operating in more than 210 countries, acquired in March 2017 by the management team and Meeschaert Capital Partners, its majority shareholder. The group is the market leader, with revenues totaling approximately €240 million and 1,900 scheduled routes and 3,500 daily urban deliveries. It has over 1,150 employees in 55 branches, in France and abroad.
Its subsidiary Novéa/STERNE City, dedicated to express deliveries, makes over 3,200 deliveries every day, mainly in Paris, Lille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg and Mulhouse. Given the growing demand for urban transport, the company is experiencing a sharp increase in its activity. As last mile delivery in urban areas is a highly challenging component of logistics, there is a strong need for optimization to increase team productivity and provide customers with better service quality. To meet these challenges, Novéa/STERNE City chose to deploy Kardinal’s real-time optimization solution.
Situation before the project
At Novéa/STERNE City, we always wanted to create and invent new solutions. Cities are constantly in motion, so we needed to find an optimization solution that would allow us to make routes with the lowest number of kilometers and the lowest CO2 impact.
Before implementing Kardinal’s solution, the Novéa/STERNE City teams were using another route optimization software. However, this software did not meet all their business needs and the calculated routes were sometimes inconsistent with field operations:
- Multi-day activity management was not possible,
- Traffic estimates were not always optimized,
- Vehicle types were not well handled by the tool,
- The optimization was static and did not allow for continuous updating.
Given these limitations, the STERNE Group looked at other solutions on the market to find a real-time optimization software solution that could take into account the specific constraints of their business.
The solution
Why Kardinal?
When reviewing the different software available on the market, the Novéa/STERNE City teams chose the only one that truly allowed for real-time optimization: Kardinal.
Kardinal's key feature was continuous optimization, which was not possible with other software solutions. Routes are constantly recalculated. Kardinal's constrained optimization also influenced our choice: many service providers can optimize distribution but from a single point without managing the pickup and delivery times of the different locations.
Now, operational teams can plan the next day’s tours at the end of each day. This allows them to schedule routes in advance and not at the last minute. Once the solution has run optimizations during the night, planners can check the calculated routes and send them to the drivers, who can then start working. Employees especially appreciate Kardinal’s continuous feature that allows them to adjust resources according to activity.
Advantages
Within the first few months of using Kardinal, the Novéa/STERNE City teams noticed improvements in their daily work:
Time savings on scheduling
More efficient and consistent routes
Reduced travel time
Improved visibility on current routes
Fewer kilometers traveled
Less stress for the teams
Our employees' job, drivers and courriers, has become very complicated nowadays, with everything that's going on, regulations, etc. They are constantly stressed by traffic, afraid of getting a ticket. I think that Kardinal's solution brings a bit of comfort and peace to our employees.
The relevance of the routes calculated by Kardinal allows operational staff to trust the tool. They no longer need to monitor it, as they used to do with the previous software. This saves valuable time, which the teams can use more efficiently to perform more important tasks.
With the previous solution, it sometimes happened that different drivers would follow each other and stop in the same street. With Kardinal, the drivers are now well sectorized, there is only one driver covering a street, or at least stopping there. The system's solutions are perfectly designed.
