Read more about how StarTrack Courier implemented Adiona or how they’re using it to win new business.
As Australia Post’s same day delivery service, StarTrack Courier handles a wide range of cargo. From live human organs and blood donations with strict handling requirements, to same day e-commerce deliveries, StarTrack’s customers have tight service agreements that must be maintained.
Re-evaluating existing runs
Keeping customers over the long run means regularly re-evaluating runs to ensure the service levels are the best they can be. Christopher Cano, National Business Improvement and Implementation Manager, says that since implementing Adiona’s route optimization, route planning teams have been empowered to revisit runs on their own without needing a data science team to help.
“The guys are looking at their runs and saying they haven’t changed in 10 years, now we have Adiona so let’s run it through there,” says Chris. “They’re just taking the initiative, they realize ‘yep, I can use this for new work, but I can also use it for existing work. How much more efficient can I make my fleet?’”
Some of the projects identified for optimization include:
- Bulk distribution customers
- On demand courier routes
- Set runs
- Future network planning
- Redeploying drivers
On a day-to-day basis, on demand courier routing volumes can fluctuate significantly.
“How many jobs one customer sends us per day changes every day. Do I need 50 drivers today? Do I need 100 drivers the next day?” Chris explains that volumes can fluctuate as much as 40% over the course of a month.
With Adiona, Chris and his team are able to respond quickly and present viable plans for tackling the volume of the day. “We put in the customer manifest and Adiona is able to tell us how many drivers we need. So the manifest will come in. Adiona already knows the drivers because we've pre-populated that and it'll say yep you have 50 drivers today. That'sall you need. The runs are normal.”
Having this work so quickly addressed frees up the team’s capacity to think bigger. “You start future thinking and saying ‘can I use it for demand planning’ or ‘how many drivers do I need’ and ‘based on those extra drivers tell me what's the most efficient run’. So it's moving away from trying to be reactive to being proactive and preemptive.”
Driver reactions to route optimization
Many logistics teams will recognize how vital drivers are to the success of an optimization project. Drivers who’ve been driving the same runs for a long time may feel that they know the territory better than a computer system.
Speaking about an optimization project for a Queensland based customer, Chris says when drivers first saw a route from Adiona they said “this isn’t the way I would do it.” However, after completing the run, the drivers said it made sense and have come to trust the routing.
Another situation saw a brand-new driver complete a route they were unfamiliar with in the exact timing Adiona’s optimization said the route should be, proving it was accurate. “A new driver who was not experienced in that run came in, followed the run sheet and the times that were provided were bang on. It underpinned the optimization because it was the first time that driver did that run and worked for that customer.”
What’s next for StarTrack Courier
“For us, it’s all about continuous improvement,” says Chris. “Sometimes it’s a small project, a safety initiative, or saving some costs.”
Adiona is currently training an AI that recognises adjustments made to routes by human planners and factors these into future optimizations. Whether it’s a simple preference to not use a certain road, or something more complicated, these repetitive adjustments will soon be incorporated into the routing. This represents huge time savings when there are 16,000 drivers across Australia Post.
“If you break it down, a driver might make three changes a day. That takes three minutes. Extrapolate that to 16,000 drivers times 250, 300 working days a year. Even a throughput of one extra package, two extra packages per driver, that’s 30,000 extra packages a day. All of a sudden, your throughput’s increased by two million packages a year without hiring any extra new drivers.”
For StarTrack Courier with a fleet of 1,000 vehicles, the impact will be smaller, however Chris’ team is slowly training more and more teams within the wider business on Adiona.
“We’ve achieved quite a lot with Adiona insuch a short amount of time, from being able to stop a customer exiting to being nominated for an award.”
“Because Adiona is a smaller company, engagement with the team has been really good. We spoke about a feature we wanted in the platform and then three weeks later we got a tap on the shoulder telling us it was ready for us to test out. The team is very friendly, very easy to deal with. Whenever we ask for something, you tell us you’ll try and then all of a sudden you smash our expectations out of the water, and it’s all underpinned by how good the product was from day one.”
