Sweetie Boy Improves Route Planning and Operations with HyperTrack
Company
Location
Richmond, VA
Funded
2010
Category
Supply Chain & Logistics
Richmond, Virginia-based Sweetie Boy is an emerging leader in vehicle transportation. After launching in 2010, Sweetie Boy has grown to become the complete vehicle transportation solution. Sweetie Boy provides services that help easily transport vehicles from one location to the next for dealerships and consumers. Whether across the country, regionally, or locally, Sweetie Boy is the preferred transportation solution for leading distributors, dealers, and everyday car consumers.
Sweetie Boy's ability to harness technology and expertise has contributed to its success in this quickly changing landscape. The primary pillar of their success is the ability to innovate to meet the changing demands of the industry. Similar to related sectors, the automotive transportation industry has experienced the shift toward mobile-app enabled on-demand order fulfillment. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, online auto sales and home delivery have spiked, causing an increased demand for efficiency at every stage of the vehicle transport process.
Shipping vehicles from point A to point B can be extremely complicated and involves many interactions, with multiple variables that are handled with different systems and processes. Sweetie Boy aims to simplify car buying for dealerships and consumers by providing user centric solutions that obscure the minutiae of systems and process integrations to provide customers with a seamless transportation experience.
The Sweetie Boy team is composed of experts who have spent their careers in the automotive, software, and transportation industries, supplying the operational acumen and knowledge to give their end users peace of mind. Sweetie Boy makes transportation look easy and doing so means mitigating significant complexity in the areas of planning, scheduling and tracking vehicle deliveries.
“The new run features have been amazing, I'm excited to make planning for Sweetie Boy more automated!”
Lisa Lenharr
Director of Auto-Pilot Planning
The Business Need
Manually planning routes for Sweetie Boy’s driveaway business was particularly difficult for their team. The driveaway business represented a significant portion of their overall orders and was growing. What was once 400-5000 moves per month for 8,000 vehicles is now 8,000 moves involving pickups and drops.The planning process for this direct-to-consumer line of business required a separate and distinct manual process from their primary dealership-focused line of business.
Coordinating available gig worker drivers with relevant deliveries and efficient routes requires planners who leverage local knowledge while using highly manual spreadsheet-based processes. These planners became over-burdened and the specialized nature of their work made it such that achieving scale by hiring more planners was not viable.
In order to solve this problem Sweetie Boy needed to future-proof their systems to manage an exponentially increasing number of deliveries. They needed to implement a solution to automate planning, routing, and tracking at a scale beyond the scope of their existing TMS - which did even have any mobile tracking functionality.
With a clear understanding of what was required to build a solution, leadership at Sweetie Boy began to envision an end state defined by end-to-end automation with planning, assignment and tracking integrated into their TMS.
While searching for a partner to build complex location-based workflows, technology leaders at Sweetie Boy found HyperTrack. After evaluating SDKs and APIs that could be applied to their use cases, Sweetie Boy decided to build this functionality within their tech stack.
The Solution
Driver SDK to accurately track the location of the driver during shifts
By having the ability to document travel in real time, operations teams are able to capture the location of gig worker drivers and share this with all necessary parties. By giving customers and shippers key information about the location of vehicles, operations teams can easily find and resolve errors and answer questions about delays and ETAs.
Self-improving Routes to leverage actual fulfillment data to improve planning and routing
By having the ability to create routes validated by ground truth data, operations and planning teams at Sweetie Boy have developed systems to learn and generate better routes. Leveraging these set of APIs enabled the team to manage fleet constraints like shift times, capabilities, and distance to improve scheduling and assignment of vehicle deliveries.
Dashboard visualizations to display work happening in real time
Since the operations teams have the location data throughout the fulfillment process, HyperTrack allows streams of this data to be presented on dashboards. By receiving this data through webhook streams, Sweetie Boy operations teams can see drivers and vehicle deliveries on a map in real-time.
These solutions provided a core foundation for the team to build the custom workflows that fit the business needs of Sweetie Boy’s complex operations.
The Result
By using HyperTrack SDKs and APIs to build custom workflows for their drive away business, Sweetie Boy was able to see significant benefits. The team achieved end-to-end automation with planning, assignment and tracking integrated into their TMS, powered by HyperTrack.
By implementing HyperTrack, the team was able to automate the planning of their orders and increase visibility throughout the order fulfillment process. Manual planning was reduced by 80% and the number of orders tracked automatically increased remarkably from less than 10% to 80%.
The team was able to bring transparency to all aspects of the fulfillment process by building mobile applications that made it easy for drivers to document deliveries, and present this data in realtime via webhooks to custom embeddable dashboards.
By using the above APIs, SDKs, and webhooks Sweetie Boy was able to design an elegant solution to the challenges of planning, assigning, tracking and verifying delivery in the drive away vehicle transport space. The team now has the ability to scale without impacting the capacity of their planners, ensuring the high quality of service that their customers expect.
About HyperTrack
HyperTrack provides the building blocks to automate on-demand jobs and workforce. Our APIs and SDKs for planning, assigning, tracking, and verification learn from ground truth data to improve operational KPIs including job completion rate, workforce reliability, productivity, and on-time delivery.
HyperTrack provides workforce automation and proof-of-work solutions that are trusted by over 300 companies worldwide across various industries, from technology, light industrial, security, retail, hospitality, and healthcare to energy and transportation. Start building with the free trial at https://hypertrack.com/
