Grocery Home Delivery with ArcGIS

Most of the time my work related blog posts are much more on the side of technical and less on the side of marketing. This particular post likely ebbs more toward the latter than the former. However, this story map does an excellent job of communicating how to get from a particularly daunting challenge to a relatively straightforward solution.

The challenge is Grocery Home Delivery, making over 1,400 deliveries using 63 delivery drivers. These delivery drivers, for our example, are distributed evenly - seven per each of nine grocery store locations. While not directly discussed in the story map prose, not only is this possible, but it is possible in a very short time window, just the afternoon - after 1:00 PM and before 5:00 PM.

Being able to solve this routing problem using ArcGIS is not a new capability. A long ago deprecated product, ArcLogistics Route, was able to do this 10 years ago. What is compelling about this new story is the tight integration.

Import orders. Optimize the routing based on complex business rules. Consider contingencies based on level of service and expenses. Deliver the manifests to delivery drivers on mobile devices. Track drivers and deliveries in real time. The tight integration and mobile capability, the ability to do all of this in ArcGIS, this is what I am excited about and really enjoy showing off.

This solution however, is only the beginning. All these stops represent households, customer locations. These locations are in ArcGIS. Once in ArcGIS, all the analysis capabilities ArcGIS offers are also now possible. This can include customer profiling for store assortment planning, analysis for marketing campaigns, and any other spatial analysis you can think of.