BIG DATA ANALYTICS IN

LOGISTICS
What is Big Data?
Volume--------------The total data collected
Velocity--------------The Speed at which data is being generated
Variety---------------The varied data types
Veracity--------------The possible quality attribute of the collected data
Value-----------------Ability to infer insights from the data.

Modes of data collection:

connected devices such as cars, smartphones, RFID
readers, webcams, and sensor networks adds a huge
number of autonomous data sources.
Devices such as these continuously generate data
streams without human intervention, increasing the
velocity of data aggregation and processing.
 LOGISTICS AND BIG DATA ARE A PERFECT MATCH

Today logistics providers manage a massive flow of goods and at the same time create vast data sets.
For millions of shipments every day, origin and destination, size, weight, content, and location are all tracked
across global delivery networks.
Big data Value Dimension
1. Operational Efficiency
1. Data is used to make better decisions, to optimize
resource consumption, and to improve process quality
and performance.
2. Customer Experience
1. Aims are to increase customer loyalty, perform precise
customer segmentation, and optimize customer service.
3. New Business models
1. Complement revenue streams from existing products,
and to create additional revenue from entirely new (data)
products.
VALUE DIMENSIONS FOR BIG DATA USE CASES
 BIG DATA APPLICATIONS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

OPEATIONAL EFFECIENCY
1. Utilizing data to predict crime hotspots
One authority that is leveraging its various data sources is the New York
Police Department (NYPD). By capturing and connecting pieces of crime-
related information, it hopes to stay one step ahead of the perpetrators of
crime. NYPD made an effort to break up the compartmentalization of its
data ingests (e.g., data from 911 calls, investigation reports, and more).
With a single view of all the information related to one particular crime,
officers achieve a more coherent, real-time picture of their cases. This shift
has significantly sped up retrospective analysis and allows the NYPD to
take action earlier in tracking down individual criminals

Figure: Development of violent crimes in New York City;

data taken from “Index Crimes Reported to Police by
Region: New York City,2003–2012
 BIG DATA APPLICATIONS
ACROSS INDUSTRIES

•CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

• Social influence analysis for customer retention

To better predict customer behavior, T-Mobile USA has
started to include social relations between subscribers
in its churn management model.
The organization uses a multi-graph technique, similar to the
methods used in social network analysis, to identify so-called
“tribe leaders”. These are people who have a strong influence
in larger, connected groups. If a tribe leader switches to a
competitor’s service, it is likely that a number of their friends
and family members will also switch.
BIG DATA APPLICATIONS ACROSS
INDUSTRIES
•CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

• Avoiding “out of stock” conditions for customer

satisfaction
The multichannel retailer Otto Group realized that
conventional methods of forecasting demand for online
and mail-order catalog items were proving inadequate
in an increasingly competitive environment.
Using a multivariate analysis tool which employs self-learning
capabilities from neural network techniques and combines
them with Bayesian statistics.16 With this analytics tool, the
group established an entirely new forecasting engine – it
trained the tool with historical data from 16 previous seasons,
and continuously inputs to the tool with 300 million
transaction records per week from the current season. This
new system generates more than one billion individual
forecasts per year, and has already delivered convincing
result.
 BIG DATA APPLICATIONS ACROSS INDUSTRIES
•NEW BUSINESS MODELS

• Crowd analytics deliver retail and advertising insights

“Dynamic Insights” initiative has commercialized the
analysis of movement data, creating incremental revenue from
retail, property, leisure, and media customers. Other carriers
have developed similar
offerings, such as Verizon’s “Precision Market
Insights” service.
In urban areas, the density of digital trails is sufficiently
high to correlate the collective behaviour of the subscriber
crowd with characteristics of a particular location or area. For
example, it’s possible to assess the attractiveness of a specific
street for opening a new store, based on high-resolution
analysis of how people move and rest in this area, and find the
opening hours likely to create maximum footfall
 LOGISTICS AS DATA DRIVEN BUSINESS

Big Data in logistics

• Analysis of information creation and consumption
• Analysis of five distinct properties of logistics to gain competitive advantage

Highlights of logistics as data driven business

BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS
BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS
The Data-driven Logistics Provider

Marketing and sales New Business

Marketing and sales Operations

Core transport network and Network flow data

Network flow data Real time

incident
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES
•INCREASING OPERATIONAL EFFECIENCY IN DISTRIBUTION :

Last mile optimization:

A major constraint in achieving high operational efficiency occurs at in
a distribution network occurs at the “last mile”.

Approaches to improve Last-mile operational efficiency:

1. A massive stream of information is processed to further maximize the performance of a conventional delivery
fleet. This is mainly achieved
by real-time optimization of delivery routes.

2. This is more disruptive approach utilizes data processing to control

an entirely new last-mile delivery model. With this, the raw capacity of a huge crowd of randomly moving people
replaces the effectiveness of a highly optimized workforce.
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES
Real-time route optimization •INCREASING OPERATIONAL EFFECIENCY IN DISTRIBUTION :
•Last-mile optimization
• Real-time route optimization
• Daily optimized initial tour Every delivery vehicle receives a continuous adaptation of the
planning based delivery sequence that takes into account geographical factors, environmental
on incoming shipment data factors, and recipient status.
• Dynamic routing system, which
recalculates What makes this a Big Data problem?
the routes depending on the
It requires the execution of combinatorial optimization procedures
current order
fed from correlated streams of real-time events to dynamically re-route
and traffic situation vehicles on the go. As a result, each driver receives instant driving direction
• Cuts costs and improves CO2 updates from the onboard navigation system, guiding the to the next best point
efficiency, of delivery.
for example by reducing mileage
DHL real time route optimization
• Daily optimized initial tour planning based on incoming shipment data
• Dynamic routing system, which recalculates the routes depending on the
current order and traffic situation
• Cuts costs and improves CO2 efficiency, for example by reducing mileage
• Real-time route optimization

Location, traffic
density, directions,
delivery sequence
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES
•OPERATIONAL EFFECIENCY
• Last-mile optimization
• Crowd-based pick-up and delivery
• Commuters taxi drivers, or students can be paid to take over last
mile delivery on the routes that they are traveling anyway.

• Scaling up the number of these affiliates to a large crowd of

occasional carriers effectively takes load off the delivery fleet.

• A real-time data stream is traced in order to assign shipments to

available carriers, based on their respective location and
destination.

• Interfaced through a mobile application, crowd affiliates publish

their current position and accept pre-selected delivery
assignments.
Existing customer base :

Order volume,
received service Location,
quality destination,
availability

Crowd-based Pickup and Delivery

A large crowd of occasionally available
carriers pick up or deliver shipments
along routes they would take anyway
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES
•OPERATIONAL EFFECIENCY
• Predictive network and capacity planning
• Strategic Network Planning
• Substantially increase predictive value, a much higher volume
and variety of information is exploited by advanced regression
and scenario modelling techniques.
• The result is a new quality of planning with expanded forecast
periods – this effectively reduces the risk of long-term
infrastructure investments and contracted external capacities.
• Operational capacity planning
• Analytic tool to measure influences of external factors on the
expected volume of parcels
• Correlates external data with internal network data
• Results in a Big Data Prediction Model that significantly
increases operational capacity planning
BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES

•CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE : Customer Value Management

• Customer Loyalty management
• Smart use of data enables the identification of valuable customers who are on the point of leaving to join the
competition. Big Data analytics allow a comprehensive assessment of customer satisfaction by merging
multiple extensive data sources.
• From this comprehensive information pool, the logistics provider can extract the attrition potential of every
single customer by applying techniques such as semantic text analytics, natural-language processing, and
pattern recognition.
• Continuous service improvement and product innovation
• Meticulous review of the entire public Internet brings unbiased customer feedback to the logistics provider.
This empowers product and operational managers to design services capable of meeting customer demand.
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES
•CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE : Supply chain risk management
• Risk evaluation and resilience planning
• To cater for the customer need for predictive risk assessment, two things must be linked and
continuously checked against each other: A model describing all elements of the supply chain topology,
and monitoring of the forces that affect the performance of this supply chain.
• Data on local developments in politics, economy, nature, health, and more must be drawn from a
plethora of sources (e.g., social media, blogs, weather forecasts, news sites, stock trackers, and many
other publically available sites), and then aggregated and analysed.
• Both semantic analytics and complex event processing techniques are required to detect patterns in this
stream of interrelated information pieces. The customer is notified when a pattern points to a critical
condition arising for one of the supply chain elements
• A unique consultancy and software solution that improves the resilience of your entire supply chain
Designed to reduce emergency costs, maintain service levels, protect sales, and enable fast post-
disruption recovery Protects your brand and market share, informs your inventory decisions, and
creates competitive advantage.
 BIG DATA IN LOGISTICS - USE CASES
•Use Cases – New Business Models
•B2B demand and supply chain forecast :
The global transportation of goods often acts as a benchmark for future economic development.
The type of goods and shipped volumes indicate regional demand and supply levels. The predictive value of logistics
data for the global economy is constituted by existing financial indices measuring the macroeconomic impact
of the logistics sector.
Examples:
1. The Baltic Dry Index28, a price index for raw materials shipped
2. The Dow Jones Transportation Average29, showing the economic stability of the 20 largest U.S. logistics providers.
By applying the power of Big Data analytics, logistics providers have a unique opportunity to
extract detailed microeconomic insights from the flow of goods through their distribution
networks.

They can exploit the huge

digital asset that is piled up from
the millions of daily shipments by
capturing demand and supply
figures in various geographical and
industry segments.
DHL Geovista B2B demand and supply chain forecast:

Market intelligence for small and medium-sized enterprises

The aggregation of shipment records (comprising origin, destination, type of

goods, quantity, and value) is an extensive source of valuable market intelligence.
As long as postal privacy is retained, logistics providers can refine this data in
order to substantiate existing external market research. With regression analysis,
the fine-grained information in a shipment database can significantly enhance
the precision of conventional demand and supply forecasts.
• Online geo marketing tool for
SMEs to analyze business
potential
The result has high predictive value – and this compound market intelligence is
therefore a compelling service that can be offered by third parties. To serve a
• Provides realistic sales forecast
broad range of potential customers, the generated forecasts are segmented
and local competitor analysis
by industry, region, and product category. The primary target groups for
based on a scientific model
advanced data services such as these are small and medium-sized enterprises
that lack capacity to conduct their own customized market research.
• A desired location can be
evaluated by using high-quality
geo data
Financial demand and supply chain analytics:

Financial analysts depend on data to generate their growth perspectives and stock ratings. Sometimes
analysts even perform manual checks on supply chains as the only available source to forecast sales figures
or
market volumes. So for ratings agencies and advisory firms in the banking and insurance sector, access to
the detailed information collected from a global distribution network is particularly valuable. An option for
logistics
providers is to create a commercial analytics platform allowing a broad range of users to “slice and dice”
raw data according to their field of research – effectively creating new revenue streams from the huge
amount of information that controls logistics operations.

In the above use cases, analytics techniques are applied

to vast amounts of shipment data. This illustrates how
logistics providers can implement new information driven
business models. In addition, the monetization
of data that already exists adds the potential of highly
profitable revenue to the logistics provider’s top line.
Real-time local intelligence

Information-driven business models are frequently built upon existing

amounts of data, but this is not a prerequisite. An established product or
service can also be extended in order to generate new information
assets. For logistics providers, the pickup and delivery of shipments
provides
a particular opportunity for a complementary new business model. No
other industry can provide the
equivalent blanket-coverage local presence of a fleet of vehicles that is
constantly on the move and geographically distributed. Logistics
providers can equip these vehicles with new devices (with camera,
sensor, and mobile connectivity miniaturization powered by the “Internet
of Things”) to collect rich sets of information on the go. This unique
capability enables logistics providers to offer existing and new customers
a completely new set of value-added data services.
 Real-time local intelligence

DHL Address Management

Address verification
The verification of a customer’s delivery address isa fundamental
requirement for online commerce. Whereas address verification is
broadly available in industrialized nations, for developing countries
and in remote areas the quality of address data is typically poor.
This is also partly due to the lack of structured namingschemes for
streets and buildings in some locations. Logistics providers can use
daily freight, express, and parcel delivery data to automatically
verify address data to achieve, for example, optimized route
• Direct match of input data with reference planning with correct geocoding for retail, banking, and public
data sector entities.
• Return incomplete or incorrect incoming
data with validated data from database
• Significant increase of data quality for
planning purposes (route planning)
Environmental intelligence
The accelerated growth of urban areas30 increases the importance of city planning activities and environmental
monitoring. By using a variety of sensors attached to delivery vehicles, logistics providers can produce rich
environmental statistics. Data sets may include measurements of ozone and fine dust pollution, temperature and
humidity, as well as traffic density, noise, and parking spot utilization along urban roads. As all of this data can be
collected en passant (in passing), it is relatively easy for logistics providers to offer a valuable data service to
authorities, environment agencies, and real-estate developers while achieving complementary revenues to
subsidize, for example, the maintenance of a large delivery fleet. There are numerous other local intelligence use
cases exploiting the ubiquity of a large delivery fleet. From road condition reports that steer plowing or road
maintenance squads, to surveys on the thermal insulation of public households, logistics providers are in pole
position as “search engines in the physical world”. Innovative services that provide all kinds of data in microscopic
geographical detail are equally attractive to advertising agencies, construction companies, and public bodies such
as police and fire departments. Big Data techniques that extract structured information from real-time footage
and sensor data are now building a technical backbone for the deployment of new data-driven business models.
Success Factors for Implementation Big Data Analytics