1. Digitalization
With the growth of the e-commerce market, consumers' requirements for speed, quality and transparency of delivery are growing. This encourages companies to invest in the creation and development of new technologies. Today you can't go far without big data analysis, digitization and automation of basic processes.
Our business processes are based on one of the most powerful “analog” infrastructures in the country, and therefore the extremely general word “digitalization” in our case is interesting because it is applicable almost everywhere. The figure is being introduced into logistics and helps both optimization and transparency based on the collected data (yes, the Russian Post works very closely with data, which we will tell you about separately), and the creation of new, initially digital processes.
Transport forecasting
Digitization of delivery processes is one of the key trends. For example, during the COVID-19 crisis, we saw a rapid growth in courier delivery - during the peak period, the growth in the number of deliveries reached 60% year-on-year. Therefore, correctly predicting the volume of shipments, finding a car of the required capacity even before you wrote a letter or packed a parcel, and build an optimal route are very important digital tasks.
To plan the total load, we use a transport logistics modeling system that calculates the expected volume based on previous statistics, seasonal forecasts and other inputs from about 60 different directories.
And to optimize transportation, we are developing a Transport Management System, which is faced with the task of not just finding transport, but finding the most economical option possible. We talked about how different digital systems participate in the work of the Post in the article "Left the sorting center": how the logistics of the Russian Post works .
Simulation modeling
It's a digital twin. The essence of the twin is that even at the stage of designing a technology or equipment, a mobile digital model is created, with the help of which it is possible to foresee possible errors and bottlenecks even before the actual launch.
This is a completely new technology for Russia, but we are already using it at the Post when designing logistics centers. The digital twin shows how objects will move inside the sorting center - virtual boxes move along conveyors and we see how changing the number of parcels and the time it takes for them to arrive affects productivity. As a result, we optimize technologies and equipment right during the development process.
New digital services for clients
Thanks to the development of digital services, the quality of service for consumers and corporate clients will increase, and opportunities for personalization, order tracking and payment for services will appear.
Already, through the Post's mobile application, you can receive email notifications or sign up for a department at a specific time so as not to stand in line or order the delivery of parcels by courier. And for online stores and large senders, a personal account is available where you can prepare parcels for shipment and exchange registered emails with government agencies.
Today, online services of the Russian Post are used by 25 million people and 37,000 companies. Mobile application , portal pochta.ru and otpravka.pochta.ruhave already become new entry points to Mail. During the pandemic, we observed how their popularity grew.
2. Refusal to own your own assets
Large logistics companies can find it difficult to cope with express delivery and peak loads during the high season - when they need to quickly find temporary staff or expand their fleet. Cooperation with sites with their own machines and employees will increase delivery capacity, speed up the search for performers for point-to-point deliveries, and at the same time reduce the load on our own infrastructure.
For fast delivery, services that work with non-professional couriers are increasingly attracted - people who are interested in additional income. During the pandemic, crowdsourced delivery platforms were in huge demand. To improve the efficiency of the last mile, Russian Post plans to integrate with such services and use their executors for their orders.
With the help of the uber-like aggregator Soyuzgruz, a member of the Russian Post accelerator, we plan to expand the range of delivery services, and at the same time reduce transport costs. We will attract additional cars through spot trading: for this, it will be enough to place an order for a one-time service on the platform and choose a suitable contractor with the best price. Instead of being limited to only those carriers with whom we have a long-term contract, we will be able to hire one-time performers with a pay-as-you-go.
Companies are looking for ways to reduce the cost of owning a vehicle fleet and all related infrastructure by using uber-like platforms, but so far no one has proposed an effective model for managing the timing and quality of B2B delivery. What has long been used in B2C is still looking for an effective development model in the business environment.
Therefore, major players are also working to reduce the cost of maintaining their own vehicles: to optimize the cost of fuel, maintenance and servicing of cars, as well as to increase the safety of the driver and cargo.
3. Intelligent transport systems
This is where IoT-based fleet management technologies come to the rescue. This is a very important story for the Russian Post fleet. The main IoT product for fleets is telematics and electronic registration devices - GPS, Wi-Fi, cameras and sensors to improve driver safety, improve communication, fuel control and route optimization. Smart sensors allow you to receive and monitor all information about the vehicle, cargo and driver in real time.
This trend has already proven its relevance in the world. One proof of this is KeepTruckin, a startup that reached unicorn status in 2019 with a valuation of $ 1.4 billion. KeepTruckin uses sensors and cameras to help drivers drive vehicles safer and more efficiently. One of the company's customers, distributor of petroleum products Woodford Oil, was able to cut the number of hard braking in half and hard acceleration by almost 70% after just four months of viewing recordings from the KeepTruckin onboard cameras.
At the Post Office, we monitor cars online using GPS Glonass sensors, which makes it possible to record all important events: see the actual route, know if the doors were closed, at what points and when the car stopped, how the fuel level in the tank changed. The analysis of this information helps to reduce the cost of your own fleet, eliminate excessive consumption or waste of fuel and minimize over-runs.
In addition to monitoring the state of the car, you can learn to remotely assess the driver's well-being: whether he is falling asleep, how tired, etc. This will make transportation even more predictable and safe.
4. Robotization of warehouses and logistics centers
It is obvious that the automation of warehouse processes increases the efficiency of sorting, warehouse storage, and helps eliminate errors in simple, repetitive processes. It is worth noting that the approach to robotization has changed - earlier it was believed that robots would replace humans, but now they are perceived as assistants who do not compete with humans for jobs.
Sorting automation
Sorting robots, inventories and transporters have long been working in warehouses at Alibaba and Amazon and other large companies. Automation increases the speed of package processing, reduces the number of sorting errors and waste.
Obviously, robots are not only small rovers on wheels like R2D2 and non-humanoid C3PO. An industrial robot is a smart conveyor, and this is exactly what is used in the logistics centers of the Russian Post to sort letters and parcels by destination. We use OCR (Optical Character Recognition), a highly intelligent software that reads and decrypts the address and index, checks whether they match the address base and transmits data to the conveyor on which container the shipment will go to. The package travels along the tape and at the right time the tape dumps it into the right container.
But sorting has not yet been fully robotized. Bulky items or mail with address errors are still handled with human input. A person is needed in situations where the sending partner has poorly typed the address and you need to parse it manually, for which a highly intelligent system is used, the core of which is a crew of several people. People are also needed to orient the parcels running along the tape "facing" the recognizer - the parcels differ too much in size, weight, density, and packaging for the robot to do it reliably enough.
Robots in fulfillment centers
Order fulfillment is a complex of services for storing, collecting, preparing and sending orders for online stores. Fulfillment warehouses handle a wide range of goods from which you need to collect small retail orders, so a huge number of SKUs are required to be processed. Now our warehouse in Vnukovo ships 12,000 orders daily.
With manual labor, warehouse productivity depends on the number of people and their qualifications. But simple math is not always applicable here: we can supply five times as many people, and productivity will only double. And the number of mistakes people make when handling parcels by hand and collecting orders manually is several times higher than with automated processing. Therefore, such major players as Walmart and Nordstrom are actively introducing robotic fulfillment processes.
The Russian Post is also building its first robotic warehouse in Novosibirsk, where automated sorting lines, OCR recognition, robots that can remove pallets with goods from the shelves will operate. In this logistics center, the bulk of the movement of goods and shipments will take place under the control of three integrated systems: conveyor, automated warehouse and warehouse management system WMS. This set of technologies should improve performance and reduce errors.
5. Customer focus / easy return
The latest trend has more to do with customer service than technology. Logistics is becoming more customer-centric and e-commerce oriented. The range of additional services is being developed. In addition to transportation from point A to point B, operators offer work with returns, develop new formats for the last mile - parcel terminals, pick-up points with the possibility of fitting.
In 2019, we saw a massive growth in the parcel terminal network. They have become so popular due to their convenience - the work schedule is up to round-the-clock, the location is in checkpoints, there is no need to choose a time to meet the courier. Now the total share of deliveries to parcel terminals is about 4% and, according to our estimates , it will double in the next 1.5-2 years.
The specifics of online sales - the inability to see and evaluate the product live, impulsive purchases, become the main reasons for return. If we simplify this process for the customer, then online stores can increase the number of loyal customers and acquire new ones, increase the average check, conversion and purchase frequency. This will give an additional impetus to the development of the e-commerce market in Russia, which is growing on average by 20% per year.
Returns optimization startups (Optoro, Returnly) are already partnering with major retailers. Optoro has partnered with IKEA, Staples and Best Buy to provide an analytical platform for managing returns and warehouse processes. Returnly helps improve the return user experience and also allows retailers to resell returned items from their own warehouses.
Russian Post has responded to this trend and launched the service “Parcel. Easy Returns ”, which allows online stores to accept shipments from customers according to a simplified scheme: the buyer can come to the nearest post office and return the goods free of charge using the track number. Return times are reduced to one minute, as the buyer does not need to fill out forms and show receipts or identity documents. In 2020, more than 12,000 residents of Moscow and the Moscow region have already used this service.
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In order to systematize and put on stream the introduction of innovations into our services, we have created a corporate accelerator of Russian Post in Skolkovo, where startups launch pilot projects and gain the ability to scale. You can find out the terms of participation and submit an application on the project website pochtatech.sk.ru .