Drive Savings, Sustainability and Fleet Safety with Liberty Coke’s Gary Williams

Gary Williams, Manager of Business Transformation and Operational Excellence at Liberty Coke, joins us to talk about using data to identify opportunities to streamline operational efficiency. 

Gary discusses his recent initiative to reduce idle time across Liberty Coke’s fleet of vehicles. To complete the project, required extensive data analysis to identify the root cause of excessive idle time across vehicle types, and ongoing driver involvement to gain full context, define an effective new process, and gain buy-in. With hundreds of vehicles on the road every day, the initiative has the potential to reduce Liberty Coke’s carbon footprint by 15-20% and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in fuel expense each year.

Listen in and learn how Gary addressed the challenges and uncovered the insight needed to develop and roll out a new process, positively impacting safety, sustainability and fuel savings.

Transcript

John:                  
Welcome, everybody. I wanted to welcome everyone back to ConnectedOps Visionary Podcast. I’m excited to speak with Gary Williams, Manager of Business Transformation and Operational Excellence at Liberty Coke. How are you doing, Gary?

Gary:                   
John, good morning. How are you doing today?

John:                  
Doing well. I know we’ve talked to you a few times before, but I have a new topic today really trying to focus on how you guys are getting quick wins out of your data. If an organization really wants to figure out how they can drive savings and efficiency to the bottom line quickly, folks are not always really sure where to start, they have to make a business case and prove out the business case to management. So I think you’ll be talking around a few areas where you really have seen some quick wins and been able to report out on it. So excited to do that today, so thanks again for joining us.

To kick off, why don’t you tell us one more time a little bit about Liberty Coke and your core values and your role at the company.

Gary:                 
Sure, John. Well, first, thanks for having me today. This is a wonderful opportunity to be able to share some thoughts with your audience. And also a little bit about Liberty Coca-Cola, we’re one of the franchise bottlers within the Coca-Cola bottling system and our geographic footprint covers Philadelphia and the five counties around Philadelphia, the northern part of Delaware, which includes Wilmington, all of New Jersey, New York City, Long Island, and the seven counties north of New York City, and then a little bit of Fairfield County, Connecticut. So that’s our footprint.

Our values here at Liberty Coke really begin with safety. Safety is the number one value above all the other values and it’s all about 100% safe, 100% of the time. What we hope for every day, and we do everything we can to make sure we meet this goal, is that when you show up today, healthy, to work, that you go home from work in the same condition you showed up in. So it’s vitally important to us, which kind of leads into our second value, which is caring. We always want to have a sense of family. We want to make sure we’re taking care of our customers and that we’re supporting the communities that we serve. In terms of growth, every business, to be sustainable, needs to grow. So one of our values around growth, again, is to be innovative, again, understand what our customers want and need, right, to be successful in their businesses, and at the same time, be able to grow our business as well. And then, finally, results. Of course you can do all of these things, but if you’re not getting results, you don’t have a sustainable business. So we’re very results-driven, focused on the successes and learning from our opportunities. 

I think the world understands what we do in terms of Coca-Cola, it’s pretty much a household name, but that’s really what the foundation is that drives us to what you ultimately experience as a consumer.

 Now, my role in Liberty Coke as a manger in the operational excellence group, I really focus on, I’ll say two primary areas these days. First, it’s around capabilities and solutions for the operations side of our business. It’s all about finding the new, cool things that are out there that are going to help us be more efficient and effective, or it’s taking the things that we already have and finding different ways to leverage those capabilities to get more use out of them and drive results. I also do a lot of project management. I get involved with a lot of project management, so that takes up a good share of my time as well.

John:                   
Excellent. It seems like sort of the values, in a way, can dovetail with your business outcomes and your corporate goals, if you’re doing the right thing by your employees and you care and everyone is safe, that can affect positively the metrics and the business outcomes you’re looking to achieve as well, right?

Gary:                  
That is absolutely true, John. And I’ve said this many times throughout my career, is that if you do the right thing and do it the right way, the results will take care of themselves. That’s not to say that there’s a setback along the way, but my experience has been that when you always do the right thing the right way, in the end it works out; there will be a positive outcome.

John:                   
Absolutely. So yeah, we’ve talked about Connected Operations. It’s a big term, a big marketplace, but we view it in terms of really fleet and safety management for your vehicles and drivers coming together. You’ve got those drivers on the road every single day, you want to keep them safe, efficient, productive. So in your own terms, what do you think running a Connected Operations means to Liberty Coke and getting to the right business outcomes?

Gary:                  
Well, like I said, safety is our number one value, right? So as you referenced, telematics provides us the capabilities to be able to see what’s happening with our drivers when they’re out there on the street. And it has been instrumental in helping us to manage the way that our vehicles are operated. We’ve seen significant improvements in the area of auto incidents. If I were to go down further into indicators like speeding, for instance, big changes in terms of how much that has declined. So what it helps us to do is build that culture of operating vehicles in a safe manner. In terms of the other areas of our business, you know, when we talk about distribution efficiency and planning, things like that, one thing that’s very, very important to us is understanding where we spend our time. And so having the ability to understand how long we spend at a customer delivery, for example, not only is that important from a planning perspective to make sure that we can get the deliveries done, not just efficiently, but be where we need to be when we need to be there, but when you start having conversations with customers about what it takes to serve them, having that data is invaluable. 

So that’s just a couple of areas. I always joke, it’s kind of like the scene from Forrest Gump where Bubba talks about all of the different ways for a pair of shrimp; I could probably on like that with telematics.

John:                   
Right. Very good. Yeah, well, let’s dig into a couple of the areas. So I know you’re doing some really interesting things, impactful things with your data in a lot of those areas, but you’ve also recently undertaken a big initiative to improve sustainability, you mentioned safety, fuel usage by reducing idle times across your fleet. Can you kind of set the stage a bit and talk about how you’re rolling that out and what the drivers are?

Gary:                  
Right, so the idling project, I guess I’ll refer to it as, you know, some people are, again, values being caring, when you talk about idling, it is a pet peeve of mine, so that was another – also a big thing that really got me focused on that particular aspect of vehicle operation. Idling is the ultimate waste – the ultimate waste. I have yet to have anybody come to me and give me a positive outcome from running a vehicle that’s not moving. Now, there is some idling that is necessary. You know, when you’re sitting at a traffic light or a stop sign, you’re not going to shut the vehicle off, but when that vehicle is parked, why does it have to be running? So it’s an opportunity, when you think about the fuel that’s being used, when you think about the emissions, idling vehicles, the emissions from those vehicles are double what a running vehicle is. There’s a safety component to it and people don’t realize that. But I know there’s been instances where an idling vehicle somehow begins to move and ends up hitting an object. If the vehicle hadn’t been running, it wouldn’t have happened. And of course there’s the laws on top of it. People don’t realize that there are actually idling laws in every municipality, be it local or state level, or county level. So that’s a lot of the aspects, reasons why we wanted to take a harder look at idling and see if we could do something about it.

John:                  
Sure. And as you kind of roll out a new process like this, you need to do a lot of research. I know you’ve worked directly with your drivers, trying to understand data coming from diagnostic codes, other readings where you can really try to make an impact and understand the context of what’s happening to figure out the right process requirements and where you need to make those changes that really make a key impact on the metrics you’re going for. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach that and how it informed your new process and sort of any surprises you might have had along the way?

Gary:                   
Yeah. No, you’re very correct in where you’re going with your question there. You know, the first thing I would say, even before we get into the how is there’s so many times when you look for opportunities that involve effort – a lot of effort on the part of the individuals that execute, that are actually on the frontline doing what they do. This is one instance where – I mean, ultimately, what are you asking an associate to do? Is shut the key off, right? Turn the key, shut the engine off. And the last time I checked, that doesn’t require a whole lot of physical effort, right? A lot of things we do require physical effort but this is not one of them. So then, when you realize, of course, then, that it’s that simple – not that simple, but it should be, the logical approach is well, go talk to the people that drive the vehicles. Because what is it – why? Why don’t you shut the trucks off? 

So the first step we took in putting together the project team is making sure that we had drivers from various business functions, because they do drive different types of vehicles, and to hear from them and to ask them, well, okay, what is it that causes you to keep a truck running or a van running? And what was interesting, the one reality we have is we do have some older vehicles in our fleet, so one of the things that came up was well, some of those trucks, early in the morning, they’re a little cranky, kind of like some of us are when we first wake up in the morning. It takes us a little longer to get going, right? So sometimes some of those vehicles have to run a little bit longer to be able to get the air and oil pressure up to a point where you can operate the vehicle in the way that it needs to be operated. Lift gates is another thing. Now, the laws do accommodate for loading and unloading devices. There are idling thresholds in the law. But if you’re going to use a loading or an unloading device attached to that vehicle, you’re permitted to idle the vehicle beyond that threshold to do what you need to do. But the equipment, you really shouldn’t need to do that very often. But when you start to run into mechanical issues or if you’re in Manhattan driving a truck around, you may not be able to replenish the charge that’s coming off the engine enough to sustain using that lift gate throughout that day, so you’re towards the end of the day and now the lift gate, you don’t have enough juice to operate the lift gate.

So those are a couple of examples. There’s probably about 20 different things we identified that the drivers shared with us that we potentially need to think about. We talked about an adjusting process. But those are a couple of primary examples.

John:                   
Yeah, great. And I think we talked about it’s people, process, and technology. You talked a lot about the process and the technology, but anything about getting folks onboard with adopting a new process? Anything that you were able to glean, best practices to build engagement and support of the team?

Gary:                  
So the first thing that’s important to communicate when you go through a process change or making adjustments is that your peers are involved. So often – and we’ve all experienced this throughout our careers - where we’re asked to do something differently than we did before and it’s coming from some faceless individual or individuals at corporate headquarters that really may not fully understand what you encounter day in and day out when you’re on the front line doing what you do. So that’s the first thing right off the bat is, hey, you know, we had folks like yourselves that were engaged in the project and helping us to figure out, well, what should we do in terms of our vehicle operation, idling vehicles? 

We had some posters that we put together that illustrated all of the negative outcomes that result from idling a vehicle. And so we had a picture of a Coke vehicle with some different bubbles that would say, did you know? It was kind of like a did you know thing; did you know that it’s double the emissions when you idle a vehicle? That for every hour you idle the vehicle, you’re burning 0.8 gallons of gas, and so on. Because we wanted to make it informative. What’s the why? The why is always – everybody always has the question, why are you asking me to do something different than I do today? We tried to answer the why and we had stickers made up to put in the vehicles, basically idling with a line through it, we had some illustrations, and that was pretty cool. Obviously we had to communicate a process change. So when we talked to our drivers and we were introducing this change, we had to walk them through, okay, where in your process, whether you’re a delivery driver or a service technician, a vending driver, at what point does the vehicle get shut off? At what point is it okay to idle the vehicle? So we had to actually do that in driver meetings, I don’t want to call it a training because they know how to drive their vehicles, they know how to start and shut the engine off, but it was more about informing them about what was expected in their process.

John:                  
Any particular capabilities you can highlight that allowed you to customize that process either to drive more visibility, transparency, or update and iterate it over time to get better?

Gary:                  
Well, the most apparent capability that IntelliShift provides to us is that alerting capability. And for our folks that work with our frontline associates, they are able to set alerts up at the threshold or just prior to threshold for when now idling is not good. And one of the things we did communicate to our drivers is if they needed an exception, right, that they would contact their supervisor. So now, of course, when the supervisor gets the alert, not only are they wondering why the truck is still running and maybe contacting the driver to say, hey, shut the truck off, but why didn’t you contact me? Because if you needed to idle the vehicle, okay, just let me know. 

So the alerting capability that IntelliShift and the telematics capability provide to us is important in real time to be able to react to situations. You know, of course there’s reporting capability within the platform that I think it’s excellent because it gives you the exact location and the exact time down to the second when that idling event started and ended and the amount of duration that it was. And when you do a project, an improvement project like we did, that data is invaluable because it allows to again, understand – like you’ll do your parado to understand well, where is idling happening and when is it happening? It’s fascinating.

John:                   
Yeah, makes sense. And obviously you guys are a distributor. Is there anything unique about the processes you’re solving as a distributor and those workflows, you know, the first few steps to reduce spend or improve safety? Anything specific about your business?

Gary:                   
Well, I don’t know if it’s – I would say the only thing specific to our business is the fact that again, I referenced lift gates, and so the large part of our fleet, especially delivery fleet, is a tractor trailer combo, so the trailers have lift gates. Because most of – obviously we deliver to places like supermarkets and Walmarts and things like that where you don’t necessarily need a lift gate, but other customers that you deliver, you need that lift gate, right, to get the pallet off the truck and down to the ground. And so of course if I’m operating a different type of business or if I’m in our service function where they drive vans, well, obviously the lift gate is not important. But otherwise, you park the vehicle, you shut it off. I mean, I know I’m oversimplifying it, but no matter what business you’re in, that really should apply no matter what you’re doing.

John:                  
Yeah, simplify the message to the audience, makes sense. Great, I really liked having you on the show. Just typically like to get a final perspective on any learnings you can offer our audience as an executive and what’s the most valuable advice or guidance you’ve been given?

Gary:                  
So I had a manager, well, you can also call him a mentor, right, he said something really profound to me one time that really stuck with me and I think it really applies here when you think about telematics capabilities. I was in a different industry at the time. What he said to me is, you know, if you’re in the area of the facility where the trailers get unloaded and you’re walking by a trailer and you happen to glance in the trailer and you see that the associate unloading the trailer is doing it incorrectly or doing something incorrectly, are you going to be the type of manager that keeps on walking, or are you making a right turn? So you want to be someone who makes a right turn. And so too often when it comes to the telematics capability, and the idling is actually a good example, you’ve got all of this data. You implement telematics in your business and everybody says, wow, this is like the silver bullet: I can see where my vehicles are, I can know what my drivers are doing, where they are, so on and so on. It’s just data, right? So what IntelliShift gives us is it enables us, but unless we make the right turn, it doesn’t do us any good. So don’t just employ telematics, but make that right turn, right hand, use the data, right, to drive improvements in your business.

John:                  
Absolutely. Understand the context and be proactive and apply it to your business. Good advice. So once again, really great talking to you today, thanks for joining us, look forward to talking to you again, and really interesting all of the processes you’re improving at Liberty Coke and hope to continue the partnership.

Gary:                  
Well, John, thank you again for having me. I really enjoyed it and look forward to the next opportunity.

John:                   
Good stuff. Take care, Gary.

Gary:                   
You too.