Uplifting the 'Last Mile Delivery' Service Experience
“The Last Mile. It’s the most critical—and the most challenging—part of today’s supply chain. From warehousing to tiered delivery options that include white glove delivery and integrated returns management, Ryder Last Mile delivers flexible solutions for big and bulky shipments."
Context
As part of Ryder’s digital transformation, I lead a team that was tasked with the creation of a custom digital platform to reimagine the ‘Last Mile Delivery’ experience (truck capacity setting and delivery routing). This was an engagement consisting of 6 weeks SxD discovery followed by 14 weeks of UX and agile implementation.
Challenge
As a long-standing, established player in the North American logistics sector, Ryder was facing profound internal and external challenges in their Last Mile business.
Exponential growth of e-commerce in the past years and resulting increase in volume of deliveries has exposed and exacerbated operational inefficiencies across business towers.
Legacy technology inhibiting innovation, and an influx of new, nimble competitors posed a threat to growth and market position.
A rise in expectations from retailers and their consumers around status visibility customisability, and communication options throughout the delivery process demanded an uplift of the entire B2B2C customer experience.
Approach
I lead a team of 4 designers delivering insights and designs, managing the client in the USA and liaising with the scrum and engineering teams in India.
We gained comprehensive insight into current state workflows, and system/ task dependencies by interviewing stakeholders and customers, and observing users of the current systems.
Building on the pain points and needs-gaps we had identified, we invited users to co-creation workshops to ideate a future vision for the Last Mile Delivery experience.
Based on the work of the discovery phase (6 weeks), we created a solution concept with a set of potential product features, and helped the client prioritise and define them into an MVP.
The design and implementation of the new platform was rolled out in alignment with the business's enterprise level strategic transformation roadmap. Our design and development teams embedded with Ryder’s in-house technology group and delivered the product in lean agile over the course of 13 weeks.
Outcome
- Key capability upgrades, and standardisation of workflows with options for customisation.
- Streamlined IA and task flows, radically simplified layouts and interactions.
- Principle design system based on Google Material Design (Angular JS)
- Future-proof user experience for coming releases with library of UI and interaction patterns
Our team created an intuitive, unified experience for Ryder Last Mile staff, customers, and their end consumers that integrates seamlessly with existing off-the-shelf solutions in the tech ecosystem.
Impact
The new platform inserts itself seamlessly into the current state technology ecosystem yet it is flexible enough to respond to changes in scale and structure of future networks.
The solution we delivered is geared to drastically improve speed to schedule, truck and delivery staff productivity and utilisation, and route optimisation. This will increase client satisfaction and reduced rescheduling calls from consumers.
The reimagined Last Mile Delivery experience paves the way for additional process automation and use of AI to further uplift overall operational efficiency.