Winn’s Hauling Inc., a Richmond, Va.-based company that specializes in the delivery of furniture and appliances, has implemented the Cheetah Delivery System by Cheetah Software Systems Inc. of Westlake Village, Calif.

Winn’s traditional dispatching administration system came under severe strain due to rapid expansion. The success of the operation depended upon highly experienced dispatchers at each location and it took that team of dispatchers and assistants 10 hours to build a handful of routes.
“Due to system inefficiencies, each driver used to do only eight or nine stops per day,” said Beale Martin, vice president of operations at Winn’s Hauling. “We had to have dispatchers working round the clock to stay on top of drivers and kept our distribution centers open long hours in order to get our routes done daily,” said Martin. “We knew we had to make a change to stay profitable.”
Winn’s Hauling discovered that alternative route optimization and dispatching systems would require extensive modification. Cheetah, on the other hand, already integrated completely with the GE/Home Depot order entry system being used by Winn’s. According to Martin, it was a good fit for the company’s mode of operation from the get-go.
“The other systems looked OK, but we wanted to work with the one that would be up and running the fastest,” he said. “Only Cheetah had the contacts with GE and was already getting the data fed from GE to the dispatching system. We realized this would cut down our routing times.”
The cost of the Cheetah system was further reduced using Cheetah’s low-cost application service provider (ASP) model. Instead of purchasing all the hardware and software, Cheetah acts as an ASP using its own secure servers to host the logistics software for Winn’s. As well as greatly reducing costs, this approach provides for extremely easy implementation, rapid return on investment (ROI) and enabled the company to implement an automated system without adding in-house IT staff.