Success Story · Manufacturing & Logistics
From notecards to real-time routing
How Otto By Products replaced a paper-bound, memory-dependent scheduling process with a digital routing system built for the next generation of the business.
Otto By Products
Rendering & Sustainability · Operations
2,000+
Restaurant sites served
17
Daily routes automated
3 wks → faster
Rebate cycle, next phase
Paper → digital
Real-time route visibility
The Challenge
Otto By Products is a family-owned rendering business built on six decades of experience, serving more than 2,000 restaurant sites across the region. But behind the scenes, daily operations ran on paper logs, handwritten notecards, and the institutional knowledge of co-founder Mike Otto.
Planning seventeen distinct daily routes — essential to timely customer service — meant referencing handwritten notecards maintained by one person. All scheduling and service-frequency information lived in his memory and his notes, leaving the entire routing system dependent on him. Drivers recorded oil-collection weights on paper at each stop, exposing critical data to loss and error, and quarterly rebate calculations took up to three weeks and multiple employees.
As the company looked to scale and transition leadership to the next generation, it needed to preserve the values and reliability that built the business while modernizing the systems that could no longer keep pace.
The Solution
AXI worked alongside Otto’s leadership to design and implement a routing automation solution built specifically around the company’s daily workflows — not an off-the-shelf product. Driver schedules are now fully digitized and automated on a weekly basis, with the flexibility to adjust service frequencies in real time.
Centralized visibility into customers and individual routes means the team can build schedules more efficiently, respond quickly to customer calls, and reprint routes on demand. What was once an arduous, memory-dependent daily task is now a streamlined, repeatable system — generating driver schedules in just a few clicks and keeping all route data in a secure, accessible interface.
Crucially, the solution was tailored to fit Otto’s business rather than forcing the business to adapt to the technology — making it both operationally powerful and simple to use in the field, with minimal training required.
The Results
The team can now plan schedules with confidence, and a process that once depended entirely on one person is now a scalable, resilient foundation for growth.
Improved customer experience — faster response times and consistent, reliable pickups.
A scalable routing system — built to support more clients and drivers as the operation grows.
Reduced risk — route knowledge no longer lives in one person’s notecards and memory.
Minimal training required — simple enough to use in the field from day one.
What's Next
Building on the momentum of the routing solution, Otto By Products and AXI are advancing to the next phase — automating the quarterly rebate calculations and integrating them to streamline check processing, further improving accuracy and scalability as Otto continues to support its loyal clients.
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