How Predictive Parcel Delivery Ensures Client Satisfaction

Imagine a company who will change the course of their business to make sure your SLA is met in real time.

How would those business decisions affect customer satisfaction? Customer loyalty? Yodel is a UK-based parcel delivery company. They perform predictive parcel delivery, taking action in real time to change the course of business. Optimizing over 5,500 delivery routes a day ensures client satisfaction with on-time deliveries.

As one of the largest delivery companies for B2B and B2C orders, Yodel serves many of the UK and Ireland’s leading retailers.

Combining internal and external data sources including geolocation, weather, time, traffic patterns, parcel data, and customer data. Teradata integrates that data for Yodel, making it available to all business users to find answers they need.

Managing a fleet of over 7,400 delivery vehicles and more than 5,500 driver tours is no easy feat. Weather, detours, traffic patterns, roadside accidents, road conditions, driver habits, vehicle maintenance, and navigator errors can negatively impact the on-time delivery of parcels. Multiply this by 500,000 parcel deliveries per day, 1M on peak days, you have a complex challenge of maintaining superior delivery service. Service delivery that can affect customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Yodel by the numbers

5,500+

delivery routes per day

145M

parcel deliveries
per year

6,000

brick and mortar stores

deliveries on peak days

Phil Clark Director of Data Sciences

Mr. Clark is director of data sciences at Yodel. He has over 25 years of experience in designing, building, supporting and managing IT solutions in the logistics, retail, and financial services sectors. He has led the implementation of a new Teradata analytics platform including the delivery of cross-departmental data integration, data visualization, dashboards, KPIs, and predictive forecasting and analytics.

Multiple data marts, legacy BI applications, and Microsoft Excel reports were not cutting it.

With the help of Teradata, Yodel integrated and implemented a data and analytics platform where all the data is available to access by internal and external clients for real-time analysis. By bringing the data together and simplifying their analytics architecture, Yodel has standard and self-service reporting, ad-hoc analysis capabilities, and insights into delivery costs, routes, and even profitability down to a single package.

Data sources

Geolocation

Understanding driver and delivery vehicle at any given moment.

Weather

Rain, dense fog, and weather advisories may impact delivery service.

Parcel data

Parcel scan information and its specific location (depots, sorting centers, delivery vehicles).

Traffic patterns

Re-routing drivers based on traffic density throughout the day.

Time

A close eye on the clock for SLA delivery time windows.

Customer data

Contracts, agreed upon SLAs, and service volumes.

This provides widespread access to accurate, timely data to improve tracking and alert delivery drivers.

Which leads to the ability to react to changes in the business, becoming more agile, responsive, and sentient—relying on data to inform decisions for the business to make. This is pervasive data intelligence.