Faster Delivery + Increased Capacity with Descartes’ Last Mile Solution

Fairmount Tire & Rubber Inc. is a 65-year-old family-run tire wholesaler and distributor serving customers across Western U.S. The company replaced inefficient, paper-based manual delivery practices with Descartes Route Planner™ On Demand to deliver more tires in less time using fewer trucks, while enhancing the customer experience with a detailed, real-time view of the order journey. In a highly competitive industry, the cloud-based Descartes solution helped Fairmount transform itself into a high-performing, data-driven, customer-focused business.

Operating across six warehouses, Fairmount was burdened with time-consuming, paper-intensive (triplicate invoices!) distribution processes that relied on tribal knowledge. A single person had the requisite customer, tire, truck capacity, and route knowledge to be able to sort through stacks of paper invoices and assign deliveries to trucks each day—a dangerous single point of failure, especially when needing to transfer that knowledge across shifts. Drivers had to use their local area knowledge or GPS-enabled maps on personal phones to map their own delivery routes. Plus, without a real-time view across the order journey, customers were left in the dark about their deliveries, which meant many phone calls to Fairmount for status updates.

“Descartes completely changed the delivery game for us—and for our customers. With one click, we eliminated reliance on tribal routing knowledge, created massive efficiencies, and fully optimized vehicle capacity and order visibility across our distribution practices. We can deliver more tires, faster, and on time. While we may be a smaller company compared to our much larger competitors, Descartes has helped to propel our customer experience past many of them by leaps and bounds.”

Scott Dushane, Director of IT, Fairmount Tire

Based in Los Angeles, CA, Fairmount Tire & Rubber Inc. has been distributing tires to retail consumers and wholesale customers in Western U.S. for 65 years. The company operates a retail store in south LA and a B2B ecommerce business serving Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Utah.

Fairmount implemented Descartes Route Planner On Demand to expedite and optimize B2B ecommerce delivery operations, consistently meet delivery promises, and provide real-time visibility into the customer’s order journey. By embedding planning best practices into the routing solution, Fairmount has scaled distribution operations across its six warehouses to drive top- and bottom-line growth while creating a frictionless, efficient customer experience to build brand loyalty.

Each evening, based on the ecommerce orders Fairmount receives during the day, the dispatch manager now sees a map-based view of orders that have been invoiced. From this view, with just one click, Fairmount can build optimal routes for the next day. The Descartes solution automatically assigns drivers to trucks and electronically dispatches detailed routes, stop sequences, and driving directions to the mobile app on drivers’ mobile devices, optimizing driver performance in the field.

“It’s unbelievable the problems that Descartes solved,” said Scott Dushane, Director of IT at Fairmount. “We’ve completely eliminated tribal routing knowledge and the giant paper shuffle we struggled with every day, enabling us to complete not only extra stops per route but also 2–3 more runs per day—which means we’re delivering more customer orders every single day.”

The solution also helped Fairmount maximize truck capacity. “Before we had Descartes, figuring out how many tires would fit in a given truck was a guessing game,” explained Dushane. “In our integration with the system, we were able to distinguish the different sizes of different tires—it’s been huge as we are now able to fill trucks up to capacity. It’s like 3D math every morning that no human could efficiently accomplish!”

Fairmount has curated a seamless experience for its B2B customers, leveraging the Descartes-powered Tire Tracker to give customers deep visibility into the supply chain, so they know exactly when their tires are picked, staged for loading and loaded onto the truck—and when that truck departs, when it is less than two stops away and when it has arrived. With real-time status alerts, updated ETAs, and electronic proof of delivery (POD), Fairmount can keep customers informed throughout the entire delivery process.

By eliminating reliance on paper invoices and tribal knowledge, Fairmount streamlined and expedited delivery practices. With optimized route planning, the distributor can complete more customer stops on a route and execute 2–3 more delivery runs every day, instead of the previous single daily run.

The Descartes-powered Tire Tracker gives customers a single-window buying and tracking experience, providing an on-demand, real-time view of the order workflow—from the initial order to picking, truck loading, in-transit status, and electronic POD.

The Descartes route optimization solution automatically recognizes different tire sizes and determines how many tires Fairmount can fit in a given truck, optimizing delivery capacity to boost productivity and drive growth.

With Descartes, drivers said goodbye to time-consuming and cumbersome paper invoices, packing slips, and POD. More efficient routes as well as turn-by-turn navigation via mobile app increases delivery efficiency while simplifying the workflow to reduce stress.