Confident planning and execution based on data-driven decision-making are transforming last-mile logistics. Paul Hamblin speaks to Aptean, a major player in the sector.
Last-mile matters. Always has, always will. It’s one of the unwritten laws of logistics.
That’s because the last mile is generally seen as the most expensive link in the supply chain. With the rise of e-commerce, it has evolved into a fiercely contested battleground, where retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers and logistics providers vie for competitive edge through customer service excellence.
Meanwhile, every modern logistics operation runs on the clock. A single misstep on timings can cause efficiency levels to plummet, with the inevitable negative effect on bottom line.
Logistics is cash
“Logistics is cash,” says Luke Robinson, International Sales Director for Aptean. “In today’s highly complex, high-speed world, the two factors which separate success from failure, are logistics and cash. Nail both, and you’re not just surviving, you’re leading.”
Robinson is International Sales Director for Aptean, a $700 million USD software powerhouse backed by venture capital and private equity, headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia. In May 2020, Aptean acquired Paragon, a leading name in the fast-growing Routing and Scheduling (R&S) sector. Two years later, it expanded further with the addition of carrier management specialist 3T to its portfolio.
Robinson is crisply confident about Aptean’s digital solutions and their power to transform logistics capabilities for his customers.
“Let’s say you’re a company making deliveries of washing machines,” he ventures. “Every time an extra route is added, you’re not just thinking of logistics, you’re considering a vehicle, its maintenance, fuel, a competent driver you can trust. In short, a whole new layer of costs. Our job is to make that addition as cost-efficient as possible with our Paragon software, and we do it by optimising routes and schedules through evidence-backed, data-driven methods.”
Robinson adds that the benefits are not just about operational efficiency, they also transform customer service. Expectations have changed, he notes, and service levels have to upgrade to match them.
“Let’s go on with that washing machine,” he illustrates. “Until a few years ago, the supplier told the customer when it was arriving according to that supplier’s own schedule, no questions asked. Now, the customer expects it in a two-hour window next Tuesday, the old machine taken away, the replacement plumbed in, the installers wearing plastic shoe covers… And it’s not just in the retail consumer world. The industrial environment is equally demanding. An assembler of steel chimney flues wants to know when the shipment is arriving at his factory – and wants to track the shipment’s journey by the hour.”
His customers, the says, have two key questions. “Can you save us cash, and can you keep our customers happy?”
To detail how Paragon works, he introduces his analogy of the ‘Big Red Line’.
“We support customers on both sides of this line. To the left we describe as ‘ahead of time’ planning, achieved via R&S and covering many sectors. In addition to transport and logistics – tins of beans, washing machines – we also support many service industries. Anything that requires movement sits on the left-hand side of this red line.”
“Each organisation has grown to carry out these functions differently. Maybe a long-term employee at a company using manual systems has it all in their head, knowing which driver prefers which run, which route works better in reverse, or being the only person who knows the right security codes at a customer’s yard.”
Every trip has its own constraints and quirks; all have the potential to be improved.
“In that vacuum of manual planning, we step in. We take all of these tasks, whatever they may be, and optimise the routes to make them as time and distance-efficient as possible, while accounting for every constraint. Maybe the delivery is for a school and must happen within a narrow time window. Or maybe aggregate X and aggregate Y can’t be grouped in the same load. All constraints go into the melting pot, and our algorithmic solutions push out the best and most efficient routes to meet those needs.”
The wins are varied. “It could mean that all of a customer’s routes can now be managed with 32 vehicles instead of 40. It could mean a lower fuel bill. Or it could be that planning, which once took a staff member a full day, can now be achieved confidently in 20 mins.
This brings us to the other side of the red line – the execution of the last-mile plan on the day. Here, the key word is visibility. All relevant parties are kept informed of shipment status via alerts and updates.
Paragon from Aptean’s ePOD (electronic Proof of Delivery) provides vital paperless visibility after the event itself. The goods have successfully been delivered, the address is correct, the installation has been carried out successfully, and the end customer has signed to show their satisfaction.
“This is about more than simple delivery of goods,” says Robinson. “It’s about what we call ePOF, or electronic proof of fulfilment,” he explains. “For instance, servicing schedules can be demonstrated to have been completed and therefore invoiced more promptly than was the case.”
The crucial breakthrough, he says, is that the end recipient is now fully engaged and included in the process, and that means far fewer inbound calls to costly customer service centres. Luke Robinson points out that this is one of the many ‘hidden’ costs of last-mile logistics, each inbound call having a cost attached to it in terms of staff time and administration.
Paragon customers are diverse – some treat transport costs as a vital daily metric; others see it as a distant cost centre. Some are replacing legacy systems; others still operate entirely manually. In fact, Robinson says, half of Paragon’s new business comes from companies still using manual processes.
“So if you’re in a business nervous about still being manual in a rapidly digitising world, think again” he says, “You’d be amazed at the gargantuan retail businesses in the UK and Europe that are still doing it all on a piece of paper,” he confides.
Paragon Benefits
Why Paragon?
“The benefits for the left-hand side of the red line can become apparent very quickly,” says Robinson. “If you have 100 vehicles, and we can optimise to save you 15 of them, that’s a seven-figure saving per year. Data-driven evidence from your existing routes, driving times, baseline mileages, carbon emissions, can reveal very quickly and clearly what improvements can be made.”
He believes Paragon outpaces the competition thanks to its depth and breadth of capability.
“With over 30 years of experience and implementation, Paragon exists at a place in the market where no constraint is a problem,” he says. “Our standard product compatibility is very high. That’s where we live in terms of our offering to the market. And when it comes to reliability? “Security is paramount. Our 99.9% uptime scores are ours to maintain, not something we hand off to the customer.”
