Pilkington targets £250k annual savings via transport deal

St Helens, UK - Glass manufacturer Pilkington is outsourcing the UK distribution of its finished products to TDG and is on target to save £250,000 a year. The four-year contract, worth around £6 million annually, is expected to save up to 25% of Pilkington’s downstream transport costs by 2012 through the use of TDG’s transport management system.

"The biggest advantage of using TDG is that it can manage our transport centrally. Previously, individual sites were largely unaware of each others movements when they were organising their own deliveries and consequently there were a lot of duplicated routes and unused capacity,” said Simon Clarke, PSU project manager.

"There are significant savings to be made by co-ordinating the sites. Already, TDG has calculated they will use up to 20% fewer vehicles. Added to that, as a Europe-wide business, they are able to negotiate more favourable deals on vehicle leasing than we could.”

TDG’s system interfaces with Pilkington every ten minutes, so transport from all the business units can be optimised, according Nick Mancz, TDG general manager for Pilkington, who said: “We look at the whole order pool dynamically and plan the vehicle routes accordingly. An added benefit to this approach is that it has led to significant improvements in management information which has enabled Pilkington to provide an even better service to its customers.”

Almost half of the company’s process business units have now moved to TDG since the implementation of the business began in 2008, and it is expected that all the UK deliveries will be made by TDG’s system by early 2010.