DHL: growing potential in B2B e-commerce

DHL Express released a Whitepaper “The Ultimate B2B E-commerce Guide: Tradition is out. Digital is in“. The paper predicts strong growth for the B2B E‑commerce market in the coming years. By 2025, 80% of all B2B sales interactions between suppliers and professional buyers will take place in digital channels.

IKEA invests in what3words technology

Ingka Investments, the investment arm of Ingka Group, owner and operator of 389 IKEA stores and e-commerce in 32 countries, has invested close to GBP 12 million in location technology what3words. The investment will be used to launch the company in new international markets while continuing to develop partners within the e-commerce and logistics sector.

MIT: e-commerce leads to lower emissions

With e-commerce setting records during the 2020 holiday season and package deliveries forecast to grow by 80% over the next decade, a new study by the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab reveals the tangible environmental benefits of online shopping versus bricks-and-mortar.

Prologis: location, not rent, is the top priority

The global pandemic has forever altered the logistics real estate landscape: supply chain decisions have become more holistic, more data-driven, and more urgent than ever. Underlying this shift are the same forces (urbanization, digitalization, and demographics) that have changed the way we live, work, and shop.

Would customers be willing to use an alternative delivery concept for the last-mile?

B2C e-commerce is still one of the fastest-growing marketing channels yielding less bundled direct-to-consumer deliveries. Last-mile deliveries cause costs and emissions especially in urban areas with a high density of online customers. Therefore, stakeholders in the context of last-mile parcel deliveries are interested in implementing efficient, innovative, and ecological last-mile concepts.

Research: strategic 3D printing in a city logistics context

Recently, 3D Printing (3DP) has started disrupting transportation worldwide by providing enormous simplifications to transportation requirements, especially in the context of city logistics. In the near future, the potential exists to replace multi-echelon transportation hubs with integrated city logistics and 3D printing manufacturing hubs. 

Research: cost‐optimal truck‐and‐robot routing for last‐mile delivery

During recent years, several companies have introduced small autonomous delivery robots and evidenced their technical applicability in field studies. However, a holistic planning framework for routing and utilizing these robots is still lacking. Current literature focuses mainly on the logistical performance of delivery using autonomous robots, ignoring real-world limitations, and does not assess the respective …

Micro depots: the smart delivery challenge

Last-mile logistics is both a source and cause of problems in urban areas, especially problems related to traffic congestion, unsustainable delivery modes and limited parking availability. In this context, multiple sustainable logistics solutions have been proposed. A paper by Rosenberg et. al. focusses on micro depots (MDs), which can function as a consolidation center and …