Tapping IoT Data to Drive Last-Mile Delivery
Companies are trying to get packages into the hands of customers faster, but so-called last-mile delivery can be costly.
The recent rise of e-commerce generally – and the powerful influence of e-commerce leader Amazon specifically – changes the rules in freight asset management. A case in point is last-mile delivery, an area where IoT (Internet of Things) data may not yet be fully tapped.
The Amazon Prime push for two-day – and even same-day – delivery has altered perceptions of what’s possible in shipping. It also challenges companies of all kinds to employ IoT and other technologies to boost logistics skill sets and meet customers’ new expectations.
Now more than ever, the goal is to get deliveries out of warehouses, off trucks and into customer’s hands – or, at least, onto their doorsteps.
This quest places attention on another “last mile”: the final stretch in the IoT data chain, where business users cull IoT sensor data to make decisions on the most efficient means to move freight to its destination.
“Amazon is putting a lot of pressure on the industry, and everybody is reacting,” said John Richardson, vice president of supply chain analytics at third-party logistics provider Transportation Insight LLC.
But he said, there are risks in trying to replicate Amazon’s one-day drive.
“It always comes back to profitability. People think they need one- or two-day service and are reacting to that. But everyone will come to ask if they can have one- or two-day servicesandprofitability,” Richardson said.
For Richardson, last-mile delivery optimization is primarily about putting the right product in the right place at the right time.
“A lot of optimization advances in the last 20 years have been focused more on cost and less about service. Now you see service get more play, and the inventory optimization piece is key,” he said.
How close you can be to your customer is the important thing, he emphasized. “That is where last-mile optimization comes in.”
Location data is vital to last-mile logistics. And, with the advent of IoT tracking devices, that data is no longer solely the province of the freight carrier.
“With some of the new technology, you can put trackers on the products, and not be dependent on the carrier for location information,” Richardson said. “This is going to drive more real-time types of decisions by business users.”
The bring-your-own-devices trend is part of an asset tracking software market expected to be worth $11 billion a year by 2023, according toMarket Research Future.
But creating state-of-the-art asset tracking systems has proved difficult for early IoT implementers, who needed to connect many moving parts to improve last-mile delivery. This has led some vendors to forge alliances to create end-to-end packages for asset management.
A full “data-to-outcome” package that can better track and understand asset locations is the goal of a partnership among telecommunications mainstay Verizon, business intelligence software maker Domo and Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon. This asset monitoring system moves IoT data collected by Verizon LTE sensors to a Cat-M1 network.
This is published to AWS IoT Core services via the Verizon ThingSpace platform. AWS IoT Core includes a built-in rules engine that can filter and route data through to the Domo IoT analytics platform.
That puts IoT data analytics in the hands of business decision-makers, according to the partnering companies.
