Integrating Order Capture and Order Delivery

The project focuses on the planning of attended last-mile delivery services. Last-mile delivery services such as recently available food delivery in Germany (e.g. AllYouNeedFresh, Bringmeister, REWE) offer comfortable food delivery within a customer chosen time window. The time of order delivery is frequently the sole physical contact between e-commerce supplier and customer. Therefore, this event is decisive with regard to customer satisfaction and perceived product quality. History shows: When delivery services are not realized in an efficient and customer-oriented manner, the underlying business model is not competitive. Particularly in metropolitan areas, logistics service providers have to rise to the challenge of successfully planning attended last-mile delivery services considering uncertain demand and traffic conditions. In metropolitan areas, the high population density offers great potential for e-commerce, while the varying traffic conditions increase uncertainty of delivery.

Many customers ask for tight service time windows and punctual deliveries, but tight service time windows significantly reduce the provider's planning degrees of freedom. They also lead to increased delivery costs or to reduced reliability in an environment determined by high competitive pressure and low profit margins. The proposed project considers service time windows as a scarce resource and as the critical interface between order capture and order delivery. Our research objective is to extend tactical and operational planning for e-fulfillment optimally utilizing this scarce resource. Our focus is on the conditions and effects of different degrees of integration between the previously separate planning tasks of order capture and order delivery. What type of information has to be aggregated and exchanged in which way? How does the quantity and quality of information affect the success of integrated planning? How do planning methods need to be extended for an integrated solution?

Team

The project „E-Fulfillment for Attended Last-Mile Delivery Services in Metropolitan Areas“ is funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and conducted by Prof. Dr. Jan Fabian Ehmke and Prof. Dr. Catherine Cleophas.

Director

Catherine Cleophas
Kiel University
Service Analytics

Publications
Contact

Jan Fabian Ehmke
University of Vienna
Business Analytics

Publications
Contact



Former team members

Charlotte Köhler
Freie Universität Berlin
Management Science

Publications
Contact


Magdalena Lang
RWTH Aachen University
Advanced Analytics



Publications

C. Köhler, M.A.K. Lang, C. Cleophas, J.F. Ehmke, Integrated Planning of Order Capture and Delivery for Attended Deliveries in Metropolitan Areas, 2018, Operations Research Proceedings 2016 pp. 435-440

Available at Springer Link

Talks

C. Köhler, Decision Support Rules for Flexible Time Window Management of Attended Home Deliveries, Mar-18, MKWI 2018, Lüneburg, Germany

M. A. K. Lang, Anticipatory Dynamic Slotting in Attended Home Delivery, Jan-18, 6th INFORMS TSL Workshop 2018, Hong Kong

Last-Mile Delivery Workshop

Once a year a small group of interested colleagues and their PhD students meet to present and discuss their current work in the are of last-mile delivery.

Literature Network

The focus of scientific literature that is related to this research project has shifted over the years. We provide a network that nicely visualizes this movement based on citations of some core papers in the area of E-Fulfillment and Home Delivery. Anyone who is interested in further details will also find a list of all corresponding papers.

A Virtual Laboratory

Students Projects & Theses

U. Wachsmuth, Evaluation of Delivery Cost Approximation Methods for Attended Home Deliveries, 2017

E. Schweihofer, Impact of environmental determinants in predictive modeling on forecasting purchase probabilities, 2017

J. Haferkamp, Developing an Adaptive Large Neighborhood search for route planning in Home Delivery Services with Time Windows, 2017

Contact

For any further information please send us a mail.