BOC beats odds by putting customers first.

Business Editors

MURRAY HILL, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 14, 2003

Statistically, it's easier to win the lottery than it is for a person to find the best way to make thousands of deliveries each day to as many customers.

BOC trucks make over 1,500 stops each day, delivering liquefied gases such as oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to customers throughout North America. A daunting task for a scheduler, unless somebody developed a computer program smart enough to do the calculations. That is, of course, exactly what BOC did.

"We have a difficult task, because delivery schedules are impacted by issues other than simply finding the best route," says Gary Peterson, manager of BOC's National Operations Center, which schedules each day's deliveries.

Customer delivery constraints are often challenging, Peterson says. "Many customers have asked BOC to adjust delivery schedules to comply with site security restrictions. And more customers are requiring that their gas be delivered in a sealed trailer, with a certification attesting to the gas' quality and production source. It gets even more complicated when we need to make last-minute adjustments to accommodate things like increased customer demand, unexpected equipment maintenance and inclement weather," Peterson said.

"We solved the problem by changing the way we look at scheduling. Most companies try to solve scheduling problems by looking for the most cost-effective delivery route. That's a "company-first" mentality. At BOC, once we decided to make customer needs the deciding factor, we were on our way to finding a solution. What eventually evolved is GOLD 4, a computerized scheduling program based on an algorithm that finds a space somewhere for every customer who must have a delivery," Peterson said.

The program, whose name is short for Global Optimal Liquid Distribution, BOC's proprietary scheduling software program, generates automatic schedules using all available resources. It assigns drivers and trailers to trips in a way that ensures on-time deliveries, accommodates demand fluctuations, ensures a suitable product source and gas purity and, most importantly, gets the driver to his destination safely and efficiently.

"GOLD 4 doesn't always choose the optimal cost delivery route, but it always chooses the most reliable route, which is important to our customers. It ensures that customers who need deliveries will get them," Peterson says.

BOC has been using GOLD since 1993, which is operating in the U.S., UK, South Africa, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Chile and the Philippines. The latest version, GOLD 4, has been under development for almost one year. It was first developed for Japanese markets. Then it was simulated for six months at BOC's Brinsworth Operations Centre in the UK. The program is now being field tested in the U.S. at BOC's air separation plant in Midland, N.C. and at BOC's carbon dioxide plant in Hopewell, Va.

"Assuming we receive results that meet or exceed our expectations, we plan to make GOLD 4 available to our customers by the spring of 2003," Peterson said.

The BOC Group (NYSE:BOX), the worldwide industrial gases, vacuum technologies and distribution services company, serves two million customers in more than 50 countries. It employs 46,000 people and had annual sales of some $6 billion in 2002. Further information about The BOC Group may be obtained on the Internet at http://www.boc.com. Photos of BOC's National Operations Center are available at http://www.newscast.co.uk.