Using customer-related data to enhance e-grocery home delivery

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.*Related content and download information correct at time of download. Purpose -The development of e-grocery allows people to purchase food online and benefit from home delivery service. Nevertheless, a high rate of failed deliveries due to the customer's absence causes significant loss of logistics efficiency, especially for perishable food. The purpose of this paper is to propose an innovative approach to use customer-related data to optimize e-grocery home delivery. The approach estimates the absence probability of a customer by mining electricity consumption data, in order to improve the success rate of delivery and optimize transportation. Design/methodology/approach -The methodological approach consists of two stages: a data mining stage that estimates absence probabilities, and an optimization stage to optimize transportation. Findings -Computational experiments reveal that the proposed approach could reduce the total travel distance by 3-20 percent, and theoretically increase the success rate of first-round delivery approximately by18-26 percent.Research limitations/implications -The proposed approach combines two attractive research streams on data mining and transportation planning to provide a solution for e-commerce logistics. Practical implications -This study gives an insight to e-grocery retailers and carriers on how to use customer-related data to improve home delivery effectiveness and efficiency. Social implications -The proposed approach can be used to reduce environmental footprint generated by freight distribution in a city, and to improve customers' experience on online shopping. Originality/value -Being an experimental study, this work demonstrates the effectiveness of data-driven innovative solutions to e-grocery home delivery problem. The paper also provides a methodological approach to this line of research. The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm IntroductionRecent developments of e-commerce have had a significant impact on food supply chains. Today, many traditional grocery retailers offer their customers the opportunity to purchase food items online and have them deliv...

The Research Topics on E-Grocery: Trends and Existing Gaps

“…E-grocery is now gaining momentum because it promises relative convenience to the customer, given that customers can obtain the groceries they need from the comfort of their homes or offices and at a convenient time. Mkansi et al [3] find that, contrary to expectations, the correlation between e-grocery and buying in stores is not perfect for the 10 biggest markets. However, despite the growing interest in e-grocery research, there is a need for an analysis that shows how the research has evolved in the past.…”

“…LMD needs to offer more convenience and flexibility to consumers. Pan et al [3] find that same-day and on-demand delivery services are gaining traction for e-groceries and highlight that a high rate of failed deliveries significantly increases the logistic costs, especially for perishable food. Lim et al [29] analyse the key driver variables that characterise different LMD models.…”

“…Humans need to eat in order to survive, so eating is an essential activity that is carried out several times per day [1]. Thus, it is not strange that research on e-grocery has recently received more attention in many disciplines [2,3]. E-grocery is now gaining momentum because it promises relative convenience to the customer, given that customers can obtain the groceries they need from the comfort of their homes or offices and at a convenient time.…”

Sweep Algorithms for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem with Structured Time Windows

“…Travel times are calculated proportional to the Euclidean distances rounded to integer seconds. As proposed by Pan et al [5] we assume a travel speed of 20 km/h. Each customer is randomly assigned to one time window out of a set of ten consecutive time windows, where each is one hour long.…”

Competitiveness Through the Integration of Logistics Activities in SMEs

“…In this case, delivery unreliability may result in dissatisfied customers and thereby losing the customers to a competitor (Marino, Zotteri, Montagna, 2018). In recent times, organisations are forced to redefine business logistics strategy because of the global increase in customer demand for delivery reliability, accuracy and quality service (Akinc, Meredith, 2015), for example, the use of information and communication technology, just-in-time approach, vendormanaged inventory, outsourcing, lean logistics and logistics flexibility (Park, Lee, Shin, Park, 2010;Yu, Cadeaux, Song, 2017;Pan, Giannikas, Han, Grover-Silva, Qiao, 2017). Therefore, H3: There is a positive relationship between the use of logistics activities and delivery reliability competitiveness among SMEs…”