by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Micro-shopping trips, defined as trips that take less than five minutes, are becoming increasingly common thanks to grocery services that let customers order online and pick up in-store. The increase is attributed to lockers, where shoppers can pick up preordered items. Bryan Pearson reports about it in Forbes.
Using metro and tram for urban freight could be a good plan. TramSit is a new logistics system to transfer cargo to and from dense cities without the need of any motorized vehicle like vans and trucks based on containerisation.
Dutch e-groceries company Picnic is taking responsibility for decreasing the energy footprint. Picnic’s mission is to: maximise energy efficiency, source electricity from 100% renewables and ensure that energy is used when supply is high and demand is low.
PostNL is replacing 20 car trips with diesel delivery vans in Utrecht (NL) every day through more sustainable delivery with electric cargo bikes and light electric vehicles. PostNL previously did this in Amsterdam (NL). PostNL delivers business mail and empties more than 150 letter boxes in the city.
Major European cities have become a testing ground for the next phase of city delivery for UPS. UPS Chief Information and Engineering Officer Juan Perez talked about the future of the UPS network; how they are integrating technology to connect the facilities, fleet, drivers and information systems fueling a more sustainable global network.
Delivering affordable, high-quality products to the billions of people who live in poorly served or remote locations presents a huge opportunity for innovative social enterprises. Unilever is now sharing their expertise to help them create successful ‘last-mile distribution’ models.
Food couriers have recently joined truck and taxi drivers in the category of jobs that are most likely to be made obsolete by self-driving technology. Ford is currently experimenting with self-driving delivery vans in Miami since earlier this year. And more recently, Ford joined with Postmates to see how people ordering takeout food would interact with …
The CART Pitch Event presented by US dunnhumby and Winsight Grocery Business reviewed hundreds of solutions to arrive at the winner: udelv, the first custom-made, public-road autonomous and electric delivery vehicle.
UPS announced it plans to deploy 50 plug-in electric delivery trucks that will be comparable in acquisition cost to conventional-fueled trucks without any subsidies. This is an industry first that is breaking a key barrier to large scale fleet adoption.
London based Brisqq provides local logistics-as-a-service, enabling retailers to offer same day (or later date) deliveries and returns in 1-hour time slots (chosen by the customer). Their technology takes the pain out of delivery for retailers by connecting them with local, crowdsourced, freelancers, providing 100% visibility over deliveries and state-of-the-art security features.