The trend towards digitalization has brought new forms of purchase among users, thus giving rise to Ecommerce.

El e-commerce or Ecommerce is defined as the purchase and sale of products or services over the internet.

Currently, the relationship between Logistics and the Ecommerce has become so important that the first has become one of the fundamental pillars of the second, since the logistics industry is indispensable for the success of ecommerce. For this reason, for companies that focus their business activity on Internet sales, logistics is one of the most careful processes, since the satisfaction of their customers and the shopping experience will depend on it, especially on last mile.

Advantages of Ecommerce

Below, we show you what are the main advantages of implementing a ecommerce compared to a traditional business with the help of the specialized blog Ecommerce News:

• No geographical limitations
• wider range of products and services
• Reducing costs
• Greater ease of purchase for users in addition to a saving in time spent on the purchase
• Easier to develop marketing strategies
• Increased transparency and information for customers
• Possibility to offer a comparison of products with respect to their prices and characteristics
• No time limit

Ecommerce and the Last Mile

La Last mile corresponds to the final stage of the delivery of the order. It is one of the steps that increase logistics costs the most, due to factors such as traffic, urban limitations or inefficient routes in daily deliveries (which will later result in delays in orders, among others).

How to optimize the management of the last mile?

• Establish strategies in the delivery conditions: use collection points after failed deliveries, direct communication with the user about the status of the package, etc. Also, with regard to transportation, grouping orders by area or the use of light vehicles with better urban mobility.
• Use transportation route management software: optimize the routes that are going to be taken in the distribution of packages so that they are as efficient as possible. With this, we will achieve not only a significant reduction in fuel costs, but also a reduction in the time spent on routes and, consequently, an increase in profits. In addition, optimizing routes will make your company a much more sustainable company.

With SmartMonkey Planner you can enjoy all the advantages offered by a ecommerce thanks to our advanced software, which allows you to establish direct communication with your customers, have traceability of deliveries, optimize routes, and much more!

Try it for free!

Do you want to know what are the 5 key tools for an ecommerce? Go to our article Ecommerce: 5 essential tools to survive in 2021 and find out.

Find out how to improve logistics productivity in 4 simple steps

La productivity It is an essential indicator for analyzing the state and quality of logistics management of your company. Here are some of the recommendations that will help you increase logistic productivity of your company

Use of metrics and KPIs

To evaluate logistic productivity and process performance, the use of KPIs is essential (Key Performance Indicator). These indicators will help you measure and quantify your company's performance and compliance with established objectives. According to the article Logistics KPI: discover how to increase the productivity of your company from the technology consultancy Enzyme Advising Group, the incorporation of these parameters is an essential component in the success of any company.

It is recommended that when defining the logistics KPIs, they are developed based on the S.M.A.R.T. (Smart, Mmeasurable, Achivable, Realistic and Time-Bound) model:

• Specific: in line with your company's mission, vision and strategy.
• Measurable: Quantifying results will be key to strategy planning and subsequent decision-making.
• Achievable: define objectives as long as they are acceptable and real
• Realistic: objectives should be defined according to the capabilities and particularities of the strategy
• Time-limited: objectives with a limited period of time.

Within the KPIs, it must be taken into account which ones can be useful within each of the phases of the logistics process. This will make it easier for you to extract performance data from each department. Here are some of the most important in the different phases of the logistics process:

• Purchase and inventory: it is essential to measure the service offered by our suppliers and carry out an inventory in order to have a good organization (know the content, avoid possible errors and even reduce costs)
• Distribution: Quantifying the orders to be placed and evaluating the productivity of your employees will increase the efficiency of your warehouse
• Transportation: automating tasks related to transportation, thanks to the use of software specialized in route planning and optimization, will make the last mile an efficient and optimal process for your customers
• Order and delivery management: It is necessary to know times and quantities when carrying out a delivery service, since it will depend on increasing management and operational performance

Increase customer satisfaction

Prioritizing a stable relationship focused on customer satisfaction is the first step and an essential step to achieve success and thus increase logistics productivity.

To establish a good relationship with your customers, you must offer optimal communication throughout the process: it offers direct access, real-time monitoring of information, includes alerts, etc. It is also essential to guarantee adequate technical support: the resolution of incidents or questions that may arise quickly and effectively is essential for the satisfaction of your users. All of this will make them have all the information they may require and will help them build a much stronger relationship with your company, which will also have an impact on logistics productivity.

Optimizing resources: transport and logistics productivity

The optimization of resources when it comes to transportation is essential for the benefit and efficiency of your company, since it will help to control the traceability, trajectory and tracking of shipments. In addition, planning delivery routes efficiently and optimally will result in significant economic and time savings. Therefore, the use of specialized route planning software such as Planner, from SmartMonkey, will be a key element in increasing the logistics productivity of your company.

Design of planning systems, logistics scenarios and efficient warehouses

It is essential to have a good warehouse design, since it will have a direct impact on the supply chain and its effectiveness because this will help to manage one's own supplies properly and to greater logistic productivity.

The design or redesign of the warehouse should take into account key aspects, such as the prior analysis of the warehouse's space needs and associated areas, together with a previous study also of the expected inflow and outflow.

Do you want to know more aspects of the logistics market? We recommend that you read the article Digital transformation in the logistics sector: the 5 keys to achieving digital success to learn about the latest trends in the sector.

If you want to increase the logistics productivity of your business, join Planner and reinforce the scalability of your company.

Sant Jordi is always a special day, books, roses, queues and people, lots of people. Everyone is out on the street, enjoying a magical day for both children and adults. It is the day of the year when the most books are sold, 7.5% of annual sales In the city of Barcelona.

This year will be special. We'll have to spend it at home, enjoying a good read, our recommendation for these days The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb. This year we will save ourselves the hassle of Las Ramblas and we will have to buy the roses online. Without a doubt, a special year.

We want to take advantage of this important date to see the success of initiatives that, in a normal year, would hardly have achieved such overwhelming success.

One of our customers Santjordiacasa.com is using Highway as a tool to optimize the distribution of roses on such a special date as Sant Jordi.

Thanks to the power of the Highway route planner, they have been able to grow in deliveries and reach customers that would have been impossible for them before.

Like them, hundreds of other customers are entering a world such as home delivery. A channel that had often been completely forgotten. Thanks, or unfortunately, COVID-19 has forced the launch of new marketing channels such as Ecommerce and its own distribution and home delivery.

We are seeing this in our traditional customers, distribution companies to the HORECA channel that are converting to home distributors overnight.

Pastry shops such as Cropics they were able to deliver all the Easter monkeys in record time and have the detail of leaving a monkey at my wife's grandmother's house 😁. These types of details make being able to help small businesses make you proud of the work you do and of seeing how you can help more people around you.

We are in a very difficult time for many companies and families. There is little help to get through this crisis and reaching those people we can help is always a challenge. I encourage you to share our story, the story of our users and customers, companies that are embarking on a new adventure, delivery. Without experience, without processes, but with a desire to fight and face the corona, you are not alone.

We won this together.

The distribution on demand is an industry that is growing at a very high speed. New companies appear every day, especially in the market for food, beverages and deliveries of perishable products. And the competition is wild. Efficiency is a key metric in the “I want it all and I want it now” era and the most critical part is what happens from when a new order is placed until it is delivered.

Today I want to focus on the problem of sending new orders, that is, how to decide which courier service the order should be assigned to when an order enters the system. This is because the dispatch today is not addressed systematically. Optimizing the dispatch system can minimize delivery time and improve customer satisfaction.

The operating paradigm of companies that deliver on demand can be divided into two different types:

1. Operations based on a single warehouse are those operations focused on a single tank. This warehouse has several dealers and the programming is done once to obtain an order list; usually grouping orders by area. Amazon Prime is a good example of this paradigm.
2. Operations based on multiple warehouses are those operations that rely on choosing the order in one of the multiple warehouses and delivering it to a customer. In this case, the delivery people are scattered around the city, and once a new order arrives, it is assigned through a shipping process to one of the multiple delivery people. Companies such as Uber, Just Eat, Delivero, etc. operate this way.

The problem of dispatching is solved more or less satisfactorily in the first scenario thanks to the possibility of linking together a list of deliveries and considering it as a Traveling Seller Problem (Traveling Salesman Problem) with some pre-clustering restrictions (OK, I know that TSP is an expensive problem, but... come on, it's about Amazon).

On the contrary, in the second scenario, it is not so clear that the problem is being optimally addressed. How can a new incoming order be added to a running scenario? There are tons of variables to consider:

• Can the courier make multiple collections before starting to deliver?
• Can an already assigned order be reassigned to another courier service?
• Do all orders have the same priority? (for example, all orders must be delivered no later than 30 minutes after placing them)
  Do orders need to be delivered by a particular vehicle?
• ...

Modeling this scenario can be quite challenging, and that's why SmartMonkey has been working on this problem for a while. We call our solution Online Programming Optimization Model (OSOM) (Yes, branding isn't one of our strengths 😅, but phonetically it sounds like “incredible” and that's pretty fun). OSOM can model business restrictions and find a feasible solution to the dispatching problem.

In the simulation below, we have modeled a world where:

• A courier service can be assigned multiple pickups and deliveries at the same time
• and the first next service of each messaging service is fixed and cannot be reassigned in subsequent iterations.

The visualization contains twenty iterations of the world divided into two steps:

1. New incoming services are marked in gray.

2. Services are dynamically assigned to deliverers to optimize overall delivery time.