Janovic: same-day local delivery and out-of-state reach for a NYC paint supplier

Janovic is a Benjamin Moore paint & hardware supplier in New York City. They have 8 locations in Manhattan, 2 in the Bronx, and their primary warehouse sits in Long Island City.

The retailer sells direct-to-consumer from its website as well as b2b; NYC builders place orders electronically and by phone.

Janovic has long had logistics down to a science: they run truck routes around the city, delivering to construction sites and businesses next-day. The docks and dispatchers out of Long Island City are always busy. Online reviews consistently praise Janovic for on-time delivery.

Getcho is now an important part of Janovic’s distribution strategy. For the past year, the two have worked together to delight customers with an on-time and seamless delivery experience.

A gap in logistical offering: same-day local delivery

Next-day, less-than-truckload (LTL) routes are an efficient way to distribute heavy merchandise – a 5-gallon bucket of compound weighs 60 lbs, and a single order might contain dozens of these. Pallets and liftgates make heavy deliveries easy to transport. Dense routes ensure that the team can make many deliveries in a short amount of time, even in gridlocked Manhattan. And by doing deliveries early in the morning, they eliminate traffic and parking factors.

On the other hand, next-day truck routes sacrifice some of the flexibility that painters and builders need. Quick top ups are challenging for dispatch given the downstream impacts of changing a route – especially with a full truck. While many job sites open nearly as early as the routes start (“pull times”), others don’t or require timing granularity that an LTL route cannot support.

Considering that, in paint and construction, logistical chokepoints literally translate to project slowdowns across New York, Janovic has tried for a long time to accommodate for flexibility.

Ship-from-store, on-demand local delivery

Janovic first moved to empower store managers to offer on-demand delivery to their customer accounts. Janovic granted stores access to Roadie, a familiar gig delivery service in the Benjamin Moore world. Some store teams like the one in the Chelsea neighborhood adopted quickly.

However, many stores weren’t so quick to leverage same-day delivery. While delivery is a simple concept, there are many variables:

1. Delivery window - the start and end time where a customer can receive a delivery
2. Pickup window - the start and end time for when the order can be picked up; it’s not always perfectly correlated with the delivery window.
3. Minimum driving time - plug in the pickup and drop off addresses into Google Maps to see this (independent of stops).
4. Time in transit - the actual time between pickup and delivery (stop dependent).
5. Accessorials - customer requirements on delivery service. For example, hand loaded into a freight elevator, or liftgate required.
6. Jobsite accessibility - street parking, entry protocol, security etc
7. Delivery size - what sort of vehicle is required?

We found that when push came to shove, store teams were having to do all sorts of mental calculus to even think about what sort of promise they could make.

• It’s a 45 minute drive this time of day, can I guarantee we can deliver within two hours?
• Will 12 buckets of compound fit in a midsize vehicle? Do I need a cargo van? How will that impact timing?
• A 3-5pm delivery window sounds reasonable, but the paint won’t be mixed until 3:45pm. What can I tell this customer?
• Hmm, this jobsite is a bit of a bear. If I dispatch to a third party, will it be a giant headache when the driver arrives? Might the carrier return this to sender? Will they complain to me?
• Need an 8am Saturday delivery but the cargo needs to be picked up on Friday. Is that possible?

Even more harrowing are the unknown unknowns. Most of these questions are ones a sales rep may not know to ask. When it’s time to answer them and the train’s already left the station, you might be in trouble.

Augmenting Janovic’s ship-from-store program

The first thing Getcho did was eliminate the decision tree. Janovic store staff could text or call Getcho dispatchers who would figure out the requirements with the customer and get the best fleet price. When a sales rep connects to Getcho, delivery requirements end up changing 40% of the time. That is, we find out the customer has a hard cut-off, or they actually prefer delivery later, or the driver will need to be registered with security ahead of time.

You read that right, we’re optimizing 40% of deliveries out of the gate.

Reps really love one feature in particular: they can send a photo of their order or PO and Getcho will pick the minimum vehicle for them.

Secondly, we expanded Janovic’s fleet pool. By using services like Lugg for cargo van deliveries, we were able to find better timing – Lugg operates on preset windows rather than on-demand. Uber and DoorDash could very cheaply and quickly accommodate small orders. Roadie continues to be a delivery utility knife. We even added LTL / liftgate providers like Mothership. If Janovic’s trucks fill up, they’re still able to send 4 pallets of compound.

Last but not least, we ensured that the delivery service was on brand. Tracking links look like this:

iMessage previews look like this:

Getcho support have been trained to pass non-delivery questions up the chain to sales reps; sometimes these are requests for new orders!

Expanding Janovic’s horizons: supporting out-of-state delivery

I mentioned above that LTL routes are efficient but not flexible; late changes can mess up the formula.

LTL routes are also quite brittle from a geographic perspective. Adding a far delivery - say a two hour drive - impacts every subsequent step. Generally speaking, out-of-territory deliveries dramatically reduce a truck’s utilization.

Enter again on-demand fleet capacity. Saying yes to a South Jersey delivery need not impact a dozen Manhattan stops when dispatch can readily tap into on-demand services.

LIC now uses Getcho to book deliveries for high-value clients nearly 100 miles away. Moreover, Janovic has been surprised at how efficient on-demand dispatch has been with Getcho. While an on-demand trip can’t compete with LTL on stop density, it can much more nimbly match payloads to appropriate vehicle sizes:

• 2 pallets of compound in a cargo van could cost less per unit than the same load on a multistop box truck
• Pickup trucks and midsize vehicles allow Janovic to quickly and cost-effectively support top-up orders from VIP customers. And crucially, Getcho has proven that these top-ups keep customers coming back to Janovic for all supply needs.

Simply put, Getcho has helped Janovic expand its territory without capital intensive changes to its supply chain.