Lowering Costs with a Dedicated Route

Summary

• Client: Pathology Laboratory
• Location/Service Area:  Pleasant Hill and Greater San Francisco Bay Area
• Services Rendered: Added a dedicated daily route with centralized shuttling to reduce costs associated with high on-demand volume

The Challenge

As volume grew for one Pleasant Hill pathology lab, their on-demand delivery volume grew too. They saw a spike in South Bay pickups especially. This surge in on-demand requests was leading to higher costs per delivery and they needed a way to bring that cost down.

The Solution

We have been servicing this pathology lab for many years, and our team saw the issue right away. In response, we designed a new dedicated route to address the matter. The route begins in Hercules and travels along the I-80 corridor making pickups along the way in Oakland, San Francisco, the Peninsula and Marin County. The driver collects samples from several couriers doing regular dropoffs throughout the day and shuttles them to Am-Tran’s San Mateo office. Once all the samples are consolidated at the office, the route driver delivers everything to the main lab later in the evening. 

The shuttle route reduced on-demand delivery volume by consolidating multiple scattered, one-off pickups into a single scheduled route. Instead of placing individual on-demand orders throughout the day—especially from the South Bay—samples from various couriers were collected and centralized at Am-Tran’s San Mateo office. This allowed the lab to move all specimens together in one efficient evening delivery to Pleasant Hill, cutting down the need for frequent, costly on-demand trips.

Results

The new route immediately reduced the number of on-demand orders and overall cost of deliveries for our customer. Operations became more efficient as a single driver followed a set schedule rather than multiple drivers managing separate orders. 

Key outcomes:

• Improved efficiency: Fewer on-demand orders placed daily. 
• Lower costs: Reduced cost on the overall expense as more orders are now daily stops as part of a route.
• Compliance & safety improvements: A consolidation point is compliant with laboratory requirements.
• Customer/patient satisfaction boost: Reduced stress from staff placing orders on time on a daily basis
• Scalability & growth: Increased laboratory presence for their clients to add more pickups within the routes at no additional cost.

The pathology lab stated that it’s super helpful to send out supplies with the new route driver and that they’re able to do it at no cost. The director is happy to have a stronger presence in the area and request add-ons within the route when needed. The shuttle model helped reduce the increased cost for orders coming from the peninsula as the mileage is lower to our office compared to Pleasant Hill.

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