Cort Furniture's Automation Saves 27% In Delivery Overtime

Cort Furniture Rental’s Washington D.C. branch struggled for years with manual processes. Dispatchers relied on printouts to calculate routes and posted updates on paper copies of each truck’s manifest. The corporate Oracle system printed out the orders based on a 6 p.m. cut off for deliveries scheduled for two days later. Establishing the best routes required up to four hours, based solely on dispatcher experience.

With hundreds of thousands of pieces of furniture to pick up and drop off each year, effi ciency suffered and costs skyrocketed. “Our overtime hours soared and our fuel costs were way too high,” says Tom Mattingly, director of operations at Cort’s D.C. headquarters in Capital Heights, Maryland.

“We were totally at the mercy of the know-how of our dispatchers and transportation managers,” says Mattingly. “Fortunately, we had a great crew, but a paper-based system consumed way too much time and was riddled with inefficiency.”