Customize your fleet for a sweet ride.
The beverage business is a tough arena by any measure. To compete, manufacturers are bringing hundreds of new stock keeping units (SKU) to market each year. They’re quenching consumer thirst for innovation with 
automated dispensers like the Coca-Cola Freestyle and Pepsi Spire, touchscreen vending machines and new fountain technology. It’s no surprise that transporting these SKUs and maintaining a support fleet to service new technology introduces all kinds of logistics challenges.
What if there was a way to make it easier to get beverages from distribution centers to stores and service new technologies? There is. Through strategic customization, you can turn a box on four wheels into a sweet ride that delivers more than cases of beverages. With a customized fleet, you can handle surging capacity demands. Affordably ship smaller quantities. Improve uptime, reduce carbon emissions and prevent driver injuries – all while providing better customer service for less. Not sure how to get there? Read on …
Six cool ways to turn your beverage fleet into a sweet ride.
- Set up trucks and trailers for efficiency and easy loading/unloading
Depending on the size of the truck, you can configure it with a number bays and a mix of both refrigerated and ambient temperature space. A drop frame design helps lower the body height to improve loading and unloading. Need to support extra weight in your trailers? Adding additional cross members to the trailer frame when the trailer is built will help to spread the load, improving the useful life of the trailer. - Get products into stores faster using lift gates and rapid delivery cart systems
Providing great customer service means getting product to stores quickly, efficiently and safely. There are a couple of ways you can customize your fleet to do this. Using lift gates to automate case handling makes drivers more productive and gets more product into stores faster.Take that added efficiency a step further with the latest development in bulk beverage delivery: rapid delivery cart systems. In essence, these systems pre-load carts with pre-sold, shrink-wrapped beverages. Carts are wheeled into trailers, rolled into stores – and could double as in-store displays. - Tune truck engines, transmissions and axles to your unique needs.
Did you know you can customize your trucks’ engine, transmission and axle ratio to boost both efficiency and fuel efficiency? For a more sustainable ride and fewer greenhouse gas emissions, specify an EPA-13 engine. For truck idling reduction, auxiliary power generation units can significantly reduce fuel consumption, cut costs, enhance engine life and reduce pollution. In addition to improving performance, optimizing revolutions per minute (RPM) provides better fuel efficiency. - Make the most of your trailers; maximize payload and efficiency
Want to pack more payload per cube? Some ways to increase utilization include controlling the weight of the equipment, adding a light weight rear lift gate to increase payload capacity and distributing weight more effectively. - Tame the SKU explosion with cargo-style bodies and trailers
In recent years, beverage fleet operators have started migrating from side-load beverage truck bodies and trailers to dry cargo-style bodies and trailers, especially as SKU proliferation makes it harder to load trucks like mobile warehouses.Many distributors are using box (or bulk) trucks, often with refrigeration units, to deliver to large grocery stores and big-box stores with loading-dock facilities. Vehicles come with flexible loading configurations, readily available replacement units and dock-loading capabilities. They require less maintenance than side-load tractor-trailers. And with rear lift gates, drivers can service dock and ground delivery accounts with less lifting and manual handling. The result? Fewer driver injuries and less product damage. - Turn your trucks into brand ambassadors
One of the most visible ways to sweeten your ride is to turn the vehicles in your fleet into rolling billboards – brand ambassadors emblazoned with corporate logos, colors and even full-body graphic wraps.
Arthur J. Trahan is Sr. Manager, National Account Technical Support, Fleet Management Solutions at Ryder System, Inc. As one of Ryder’s leading experts in the food and beverage industry, Art works with clients to establish tighter connections between their needs and transportation solutions.
