Streetwise

Duration: 9/2016 – 8/2018  Funding: MIT                                     

Partners: Populus, Bun.run

StreetWise

Streetwise is an R&D collaboration project between Almende and Populus Business Development. The project is a response to the large growth in deliveries in recent years, especially to individual households. This growth is mainly the result of a change in buying behavior of consumers, towards more online purchases. Since these purchases usually need to be delivered, a new flow of traffic has sprouted in neighborhoods – that of package delivery agents. This flow tends to be much larger than necessary; too many delivery agents are driving with half-empty trucks and packages often need to be offered more than once since the consumer is not at home during the day.

The Streetwise projects aims to connect logistics providers, online stores, local ‘last mile’ delivery agents, and consumers through an online platform and mobile apps. The goal of this is to improve the efficiency of especially the last link in the logistics chain, namely the delivery to the consumer. Through the platform, the consumer can share their (un)availability with the delivery agent, reducing the amount of failed deliveries due to nobody being at home. A secondary goal is to allow different logistics providers to collaborate, coupling their deliveries in the last mile to reduce neighborhood traffic and achieve a CO² reduction of about 5%.

Contribution

Almende's contribution consisted of building the software platform and apps that facilitate communication and coordination between the various stakeholders defined above, and allow consumers to easily set their (un)availability in a way which is visible to other parties.

Results

The project resulted in an improved software platform for logistics planning. The improvements consisted of logic designed to optimize 'last-mile' delivery by combining shipments of different providers and accounting for the (un)availability of consumers.

More info?

Need specific information regarding the project? Please contact our senior consultant for more information.

Jan Kraaijeveld

Senior consultant

+31 (0)10 404 9444

jan@almende.com