A large organisation of pre-school playgroups and BSOs (out-of-school clubs) asked us to provide ice cream for just under 100 of their locations.

The characteristics of the project

• Finally, we visited 70 locations
• spread across the Arnhem-Nijmegen-Veenendaal triangle
• a maximum of several dozen children and supervisors per location
• the locations were open on different days
• some locations were open all day; others only in the morning or afternoon
• locations could not be visited between 12:30 and 14:30 because of lunch and rest time

On the one hand, the project was quite easy because:

• locations were often very close to each other
• there were very few ice creams per location
• the exact visiting times were not fixed; only the day was communicated to the locations

On the other hand, the planning turned out to be quite complex. There might have been 10 locations in 1 town close together, but the opening hours and days they were open could vary greatly. Our planner tackled this by

• selecting 10-20 locations that were reasonably close together and all open on the same day
• dividing them into locations that were only open in the morning, those that were only open in the afternoon and those that were open all day
• distil the most efficient routing with venues that could be visited before 12:30 and those that could be visited between 14:30 and 18:00
  in the end, this usually left 8-10 venues that could be visited on 1 day. This list was communicated to the client a week before the visit day, who then sent the information to the locations

 

Of course, children and supervisors loved getting ice cream from one of our authentic ice cream bicycles. Lots of photos were taken and sent to parents.