How routing software can help in reducing carbon footprint

The convenience economy has given a rise to consumerism. The rise in e-commerce has been nominal over the last few years and it has only accelerated during the pandemic. Consumer behaviour has shifted drastically, and this growth in home and online deliveries is here to stay. Be it apparel, food, grocery, furniture, cars or anything one can think of- it can be ordered online. The global last mile delivery market is close to $130 billion globally and is in line to hit $200 billion by 2027!

In such a situation, it is only apt to be thinking about the repercussions on the environment.

When it comes to delivering at the doorstep of a customer, there are several inefficiencies that come into play and lead to more distance travelled and results in higher fuel consumption. 

This number might look small for one order, but when the number of orders runs into billions, the impact is unimaginable. Half-a-mile of extra distance travelled by a delivery driver to home deliver an order would translate to billions of extra miles overall which results in tons and tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

In such a situation, where a brand has business pressures to increase the top line, automation presents a solution where technology is used to optimize routes and plan trips. This results in lesser distance travelled, savings in fuel, reduced cost of delivery, and an improved experience for the end customer. This is the promise of a vehicle routing and scheduling software.

Key features of this technology 

Digitizing Processes

There are several ways in which a retail company or a fast food restaurant chain takes in orders. This can be via their own website, mobile app, marketplaces, or third party aggregator. A complete delivery management software will enable the enterprise to take in all of these orders into a single dashboard and have complete visibility over the channels. This leads to the possibility of optimizing the way in which these orders are processed and delivered.

Route Optimization 

Once the orders are taken in on a single dashboard, artificial Intelligence and machine learning powered algorithms come into play. This routing software, which has been trained over billions of location data points, takes in all the intelligence and optimizes the routes to form trips through which thousands of orders can be delivered by delivery drivers. 

Dynamic Batching of Orders 

Consider that you have ordered a burger from McDonalds in a particular mall and a friend of yours who lives next door has ordered a coffee from Starbucks in the same mall. Now, in a typical use case, there will be two delivery drivers going, fetching the orders and respectively delivering. But imagine a situation where the delivery software can club these two orders intelligently and assign it to the same delivery driver! This basically doubles the efficiency and reduces the carbon footprint into half.

Capacity Utilization 

Another huge area of optimization is in the field of utilizing capacity appropriately. Imagine a truck moving from one part of the country to another delivering goods. In a typical use case, a transporter would have limited information and on the basis of that he or she would try and optimize the capacity of the vehicles. But if the transporter is using or is present on a network of carriers then the platform will be able to club multiple orders together and give a full truck load to every transporter. This is an even larger use case for reducing the carbon footprint on the environment by using technology.

Conclusion

All in all, logistics and delivery are a multi-billion-dollar industry globally and eCommerce is only booming. To bring in a balance in the whole space and bring in conscious consumerism, routing software and delivery management platforms can play a big role. Every brand has a responsibility towards the customers and environment to take steps to reduce the carbon footprint and using technology to optimize operations is a big step forward in this direction.

Dhruvil Sanghvi

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Dhruvil Sanghvi is the chief executive officer of LogiNext.