Case Study: Great Lakes Ace Hardware triples deliveries and boosts efficiency with WorkWave's Route Manager

How Great Lakes Ace Hardware Increased Deliveries With Route Manager

Great Lakes Ace Hardware operates a centralized home-delivery service for 44 independently owned Ace stores in the greater Detroit area. Facing a sudden pandemic-driven surge (from about 50 to 200 weekly deliveries in weeks), manual MapQuest routing, mixed item sizes, and unpredictable driver availability made planning slow, error-prone and unable to scale without adding staff.

Implementing Route Manager 360 with GPS tracking automated capacity-aware route planning, real-time updates, a violations-warning safeguard, and a driver mobile app with photo proof-of-delivery and customer notifications. As a result, Great Lakes Ace scaled from 3,900 to 13,000 deliveries in three years, saw a 30% increase since 2021, and delivered faster, more reliable service without proportionally increasing resources.

Great Lakes Ace Hardware

Bryan Deats

Senior Operations Manager