Read about how StarTrack Courier is using Adiona to win new business, and in day-to-day routing.
StarTrack Courier is Australia Post’s Same Day Delivery business, with a focus on speed. StarTrack Courier services a wide variety of businesses, from same day delivery for B2B and B2C companies like The Iconic and Wesfarmers Health, to life-saving blood and live human organs for Life Blood and Donate Life. What these very different cargos have in common is strict service levels that must be met for a successful delivery.
National Business Improvement and Implementation Manager Christopher Cano got in touch with Adiona after one of StarTrack Courier’s largest customers left for a competitor, and gave three to four points of feedback that included the lack of route optimization. Chris, who oversees continuous improvement projects, said “we’ve been around for over 200 years, but our technology doesn’t have to be prehistoric. We can be at the forefront of transport and logistics by utilizing technology like Adiona.”
This competitive spirit had mostly materialized in innovation in the delivery centers and sorting. Losing a customer was the catalyst they needed to start looking into improving the last mile, while keeping deliveries fast and costs low.
Route planning before having a route optimization tool
Prior to looking for a route optimization tool, the StarTrack Courier team was planning routes using a mixture of free software, free versions of paid software, and Google Maps. Their planning process efficiency was capped by stop limits that maxed out at just 100 stops.
With fluctuating volume, one day they couldonly have 20 or 30 stops to plan, but the next day could be in excess of 5,000. This setup led to the team relying on institutional knowledge gathered overyears of experience.
Routes were planned on Google Maps and then the coordinates would be typed into Excel, sense checked against local knowledge, and then handed over to drivers.
Chris says driver incentives play a large role in routing as well. If they’re being paid hourly, completing a route quickly so customers get faster deliveries isn’t a positive for the driver. If they’re paid per stop, completing a route quickly could mean getting to go home earlier and pick up their kids from school while still getting paid the full amount, or picking up extra deliveries and earning more in the same amount of time.
“If a run was not sequenced and unoptimized, we would just give it to a driver and say ‘do your best’. Now, we look at anold route that took eight hours, see how it could be optimized, and do it in seven. A one hour saving per day over 250 working days in a year is a massive saving.”
With 16,000 drivers across Australia Post’s national network, an extra 16,000 hours of productivity per day really adds up.
Route optimization with Adiona
Now that Chris’ team is optimizing routes, their process has streamlined significantly. Chris says the ease of use of Adiona’s platform means work they previously would have given to a data science team is now being done by dispatchers and the local operations team.
“Previously when we had to handle Optimization Projects we knew it would take days if not weeks with multiple resources being used up due to being such a large data set." The amount of manual work to make it happen would be quite large and not replicable or scalable in thefuture.
With how easy Adiona is to use, Chris is confident in giving a dispatcher or local operations team member access to it and letting them do it themselves. Empowering these teams has led to a lot of proactivity.
“As we train up more people, and it only takes half an hour to an hour to train them, their confidence is going up and they’re able to self-serve. If they have a new customer to onboard, they can easily get the best runs to do it in. There are teams who are looking at runs they’ve had for 10 years that we’ve never changed, and they’re putting them into Adiona and optimizing them. They’re putting a lens of machine learning and AI on it, whereas before it was patchy Excel spreadsheets.
“Putting [a patchy Excel spreadsheet] in front of a $1 million or $2 million customer doesn’t really drive confidence, whereas now we take professional looking outputs from Adiona and have the data presented in a uniform way across all regions because that’s how it comes straight out of the platform.
“It’s become second nature to use Adiona in our day-to-day. We use it so much that we don’t think about it. It’s like Outlook or Teams – you couldn’t imagine your day without it. It just comes as second nature.”
Selecting Adiona
Chris’ team undertook rigorous market research, taking several months to complete and spanning over a dozen route optimization companies across North America, Asia, Europe, and Australia.
With each of the options, a trial was completed using the same data sets to accurately and fairly compare the outputs. Chris admits Adiona was a last-minute addition to the possible vendorlist, but “you ended up being head and shoulders above the rest.”
- Onboarding with Adiona didn’t require any uplift from StarTrack Courier’s IT team
- Setting up Adiona is “intuitive and straightforward, complemented by helpful pop-up messages that assist users”
- The optimization process was described as “not only efficient, but also informative with alerts for any geolocation issues and allowing for immediate corrections or exclusions”
- Adiona’s route manipulation enables changes to individual stops or groups of stops using a simple lasso tool, likewise, deleting individual stops from a route is easy
- StarTrack Courier required a robust pickup and drop off delivery model, for which Adiona has a dedicated algorithm
And finally, “the customer support has been exceptional, with a partnership approach that allows us to provide feedback andrequest future enhancements tailored to our broader business needs.”
