Roadway Goes Heavy on Parcel Delivery

Transportation services provider Roadway is going after the home delivery business. The company has teamed up with NonstopDelivery, a third-party logistics provider specializing in home delivery and supply chain management, to roll out a final mile delivery service for heavyweight goods throughout the U.S.

The Roadway Custom Solutions Specialized Pickup and Delivery Service, introduced in June, offers simple and complex final-mile deliveries to homes and businesses. The service, designed for catalog/online sales, custom ordered items, and retail deliveries, is geared for parcels weighing more than 150 lbs. Typical products delivered include furniture, consumer electronics, appliances, medical equipment, office and home improvement goods.

Terry Gilbert, president of Roadway, says the new service “compresses the length of time the e-tailer customers traditionally experience by a magnitude of days.”

“Traditionally, heavier consumer freight destined for residential delivery points are not highly time-sensitive,” he says. “Therefore, to gain economic efficiencies, most heavy goods residential delivery carriers build freight volume over time, and then move the product to the final destination only when the trailer reaches full capacity.”

“Depending upon freight volumes, hub topography, total mileage, lane capacity, seasonality, and management policy, the customer’s freight may take anywhere from one to upwards of six weeks from the date of order placement for the product to reach the shipper’s customer,” he says.

Roadway uses computer-based routing technologies and its extensive national service center network, along with the combined shipping volumes of Roadway and NonstopDelivery, “so we’re able to build to capacity and move our trailers within a more compressed and consistent time-frame. “

How much faster is it? “Our transit times run between three and ten days, compared to our competitors that can run two to three times longer,” Gilbert says.

The new service is comprised of three service levels: White Glove, which includes product unpacking, room of choice delivery, debris removal, with a four-hour appointment window and a two-man delivery team; Threshold, which includes delivery inside main door and a one- or two-man delivery scenario; and Basic Delivery, which is comprised of delivery to door or driveway, with one-man delivery.

Based on current rates found on Roadway.com, to ship a 150-lb. parcel (NMFS Class 50) from New York to Los Angeles, at the White Glove service level, costs $485.04 (including an introductory discount of $55.00). To do the same shipment at the Basic service level costs $320.04.

Roadway, a subsidiary of YRC Worldwide, has been partnering with NonstopDelivery for three years. Roadway has more than 295 U.S.-based service centers, while NonstopDelivery has more than 210 distribution points and services more than 42,000 U.S. zip codes.