Fleet Management Software for Distribution and FMCG Fleets
Secondary distribution runs the same streets to the same outlets every day, into booked slots, for a customer who can refuse the pallet on the loading bay. KO Fleetz manages the part your order system never sees: the vehicle, the slot, the crates that came back and the ones that did not.
Operational reality
What makes distribution & fmcg different
The slot is booked and it is not yours to move
A grocery goods-in bay expects you inside a narrow window. Arrive late and you join a queue behind whoever took your place, or you are turned away and the drop moves to tomorrow at your cost.
The customer can say no at the door
Short-dated cases, a crushed carton, a quantity that does not match the purchase order. The driver becomes the person agreeing a credit, a partial acceptance or a full rejection, standing on a bay with a queue behind them.
The crates do not come back
Trays, roll cages, dollies and pallets go out with the load and return at a rate nobody measures. They are a real asset on a balance sheet and they are managed as though they were packaging.
The van is a warehouse and a till
In van sales the stock is sold from the vehicle, the count on board changes at every outlet, and a card terminal or cash sits in the cab. Reconciling stock, money and drops is a daily audit, not a monthly one.
The tail lift has its own regime
Load-handling equipment carries an examination and inspection schedule separate from the vehicle's service. It is also the component whose failure ends the round, because a bay with no forklift needs a working lift.
The same round, two hundred and fifty times a year
Fixed daily routes are the sector's defining feature. Two wasted minutes per drop is invisible on a Tuesday and is a vehicle's worth of capacity across a year. Nobody notices, because nothing ever appears to go wrong.
Service level is measured by the buyer
Multiples score suppliers on delivering in full and on time, and their measurement is the one that counts commercially. Disputing it without your own arrival record is a losing position at every trading review.
How secondary distribution runs
Orders close, the pick happens overnight, and the load is built to the round rather than to the warehouse's convenience, last drop loaded first, because a driver working out of a rear door with a tail lift cannot dig. Slots are already booked with the larger accounts, so the route is not a blank optimisation problem. It is a fixed set of appointments with a driving problem in between, and the plan's job is to arrive inside the window without wasting the gaps.
At each outlet the driver does far more than hand over cases. They queue for a bay, they get the delivery checked in against a purchase order, they take back empties and cages, they handle the case refused for damage, and they get a signature from someone who has three other suppliers waiting. Every one of those is a commercial event. On paper they become a pile of dockets that reach the office two days later, by which time the customer has already raised the credit and the argument is retrospective. KO Fleetz captures the refusal, the part-acceptance and the empties taken back at the bay itself, so the record travels home with the vehicle rather than two days behind it.
Back at the depot the round has to close in three currencies at once: stock that left against stock that returned, money if it is a van sales operation, and returnable assets issued against a count. Then the vehicle needs its checks, the tail lift needs its examination date honoured, and it goes out again tomorrow on the identical run. That repetition is the whole opportunity. A round this predictable can genuinely be measured, which is rarely true anywhere else in freight.
Feature mapping
Which modules matter here, and why
Not every fleet needs every module. This is what actually earns its place in this industry.
Distribution routes are appointments, not journeys. The plan has to respect a slot at a retailer's bay, and the proof has to record what a trade customer accepted, refused and returned, because a signature that only says 'delivered' is useless when eleven cases came back and a credit note is on its way.
Your service level is scored by the buyer against their own booking window. A geofenced arrival at their yard gives you an independent record of when you presented, which is what separates 'we were late' from 'we were on the bay at 06:52 and their goods-in did not open until 07:40'.
A distribution vehicle is a rigid with a body and load equipment bolted to it, and that equipment has its own examination requirements and its own failure modes. A tail lift that will not deploy at a supermarket bay ends the round as surely as an engine fault, and it never appears on a chassis service schedule.
A round that runs unchanged all year is the rare case where comparison is genuinely fair. Same vehicle, same drops, same driver rotation means a two-minute drift at one outlet is detectable, and worth an entire vehicle across a year. That is not true of any operation where every day is different. KO Fleetz holds each identical round's arrival and turnaround times against the last, so a drift no one would feel on a single Tuesday shows up as a trend.
A vehicle full of fast-moving branded stock, parked repeatedly on a public street while the driver walks cases into a shop, is an easy target. Knowing when the rear door opened and where the vehicle was standing turns a monthly shrinkage figure into a set of specific events with a time and a place.
Outcomes
What changes
- Arrival at the bay recorded independently of the buyer
- Slot evidence
- Refusals and returns captured before the credit lands
- At the bay
- Two minutes a drop made visible across a year
- Route drift
- Tail lifts and bodies tracked alongside the chassis
- Equipment dates
The systems around a distribution fleet
The distribution management or ERP system owns the order, the price and the credit; KO Fleetz owns the vehicle and the visit, and the delivery outcome has to flow back so a refusal at the bay becomes a credit note without anyone retyping a docket. Warehouse systems supply the load and take the returns. Retailer booking portals set the slot the route has to honour, and their scorecards are the number you are judged against. Sales force and merchandiser tools share the outlet list. Fuel cards, telematics units and workshop suppliers feed the cost side of every route.
Explore integrationsFrequently asked questions
Not as a stock system, and you should not want it to be one. Your distribution or ERP platform holds the SKU, the batch, the price and the ledger, and duplicating that creates two truths about how many cases are on a van. What KO Fleetz contributes is the visit: which outlet, when it was reached, what the driver recorded as delivered, refused or returned, and what that trip cost to run. The outcome flows back to the system that owns the stock. The integration is the point, not the replacement.
It can track custody at the drop, which is the honest scope. Issued and returned counts are captured against each outlet visit with the driver's record and a signature, so a customer holding forty cages becomes a visible balance rather than an annual write-off. Item-level tracking of an individual crate is a different proposition: it needs a tag on each asset and a scan at every handover, and it only pays for itself where the unit is expensive enough to justify that discipline. Most fleets need the balance, not the tag.
Yes, but its job changes. With fixed appointments the route is not being optimised for the shortest path. It is being sequenced so the gaps between commitments are not wasted and the vehicle presents inside each window rather than an hour early into a queue. It also tells you something the portal never will: which of those slots are structurally impossible to hit given the drop before them. That is a conversation to have with the account, and it needs your arrival data to be credible.
It gives you the evidence and it does not move the score by itself. The measurement is theirs and it is taken at their goods-in. What changes is your position when the two records disagree. An independent, timestamped arrival at their gate lets you separate the shortfalls that were genuinely yours, a late departure or a vehicle off the road or a picking error, from the ones caused by their bay being unmanned. Fix the first group and stop conceding the second. That is the realistic gain, and it is worth having.
As assets attached to the vehicle with their own schedule. A tail lift, a fridge body or a demountable has an inspection or thorough-examination requirement that runs on its own cycle and does not follow the chassis service interval. They are registered separately, they raise their own reminders, and a defect on the lift opens a work order the same way an engine fault would. The specific legal examination requirements vary by jurisdiction and equipment type: the platform holds your dates and prompts them, it does not interpret your regulations for you.
That is precisely what makes them measurable. Everywhere else in freight, comparison is contaminated because no two days match. A round that serves the same twenty-two outlets every weekday gives you a real baseline, so an outlet whose turnaround has quietly grown from eight minutes to fourteen shows up as a trend rather than as a bad mood on a Thursday. Fixed routes also mean the round was designed once, possibly years ago, against volumes that have since moved. Having the data is how you find out.
Bring us one round and one retailer scorecard
We will put your arrival record next to their measurement and show you which shortfalls are yours and which you have been absorbing.