FarEye is a global last-mile delivery and logistics visibility platform. OptiChain is its affiliate partner in South Africa. Visit fareye.com
The customer
Gordon Food Service is a family-operated broadline food distributor. FarEye's case study describes it as the largest such company in North America, with 19,000 employees and US$12.9 billion in annual revenue. It serves restaurants, healthcare and schools across the United States and Canada.
The problem
GFS delivered weekly truckloads of food products from its distribution centres. It wanted to offer same-day orders for items that customers ran short of, using its stores as mini-fulfilment centres.
Planning same-day van routes by hand took time and produced inefficient routes, missed delivery windows and an inconsistent customer experience. Customers could not track a same-day order.
GFS also wanted a last-mile strategy across all its channels, faster driver operations through better route planning, and notifications about deliveries in time slots customers had chosen.
What FarEye changed
FarEye lists three products in the deployment: Experience, Route and Execute. The case study credits the solution with:
- Capacity planning combined with order management
- A driver app with planned routes to hit target delivery windows
- Real-time manager visibility into where each order is in the delivery process
- A customer app with track and trace and real-time order updates
- Same-day delivery of individual items from GFS stores
- A three-hour delivery window option, with on-time delivery inside the chosen window
The result
The case study reports no other figures, such as cost per delivery or on-time rate. The figures are FarEye's, for its customer, and OptiChain has not audited them.
Questions for your own network
The model fits a business with a branch or store network and customers who run short between scheduled deliveries. Three questions to test it against your own operation:
- Which of your stores or branches could act as a fulfilment point for urgent orders?
- How do you plan same-day routes today, and how many missed windows trace back to that planning?
- Can a customer see where a same-day order is?
Where OptiChain sits
OptiChain is FarEye's affiliate partner in South Africa. We support business case work, project scoping, and integration with your current carrier network, ERP and warehouse systems.
Talk to us about last-mile delivery
Tell us about your delivery network and volumes, and we will say whether FarEye fits.
Sources
- How Gordon Food Service Made Same-Day Delivery a Competitive Advantage, FarEye, page updated 17 April 2025
- FarEye, company site