Transforming logistics and package delivery with data and AI

With more than 50 years of experience and 43 million packages distributed annually, Relais Colis is both a pioneer and an expert in parcel delivery. The French company began its analytics journey with SAS in 2018 to optimize workflows and improve service quality, moving away from Excel spreadsheets toward dynamic data visualization and interactive reports in SAS Visual Analytics. In 2023, Relais Colis modernized its approach again, moving to SAS Viya, the cloud-native data and AI platform, hosted on Microsoft Azure.

“In the first phase of developing our analytical approach, we focused on optimizing logistics and delivery operations, ensuring that business users could learn to manage Relais Colis’ activities through data,” says Yann Radenac, Data Director of Relais Colis.

With SAS Visual Analytics, managers could see the delivery vehicles in real time to ensure the necessary resources were available to complete deliveries. And once the trucks were on the road, managers could see if packages were delivered properly. Using real-time data, they could anticipate problems and alert customers to changes, if needed. Other improvements include vastly enhanced data extraction and analysis, which saves managers (and operators) thousands of hours each year.

As data began to play an increasingly strategic role in Relais Colis’ operations, the company knew that democratizing analytics would be essential to take its business to the next level.

Working smarter with augmented analytics

Organizations are moving away from traditional, static business intelligence (BI) reporting and dashboarding that provide a limited amount of insights. In today’s fast-paced and unpredictable business landscape, companies need a comprehensive, data-driven approach that extends beyond traditional BI. This is where augmented analytics enters the picture. Augmented analytics pairs BI with AI and machine learning to help business users across all skill sets make data-driven decisions. Having fast, reliable, automated insights enhances productivity throughout the organization – as data literacy increases, data scientists can focus on higher-level initiatives.

With SAS solutions in place, Relais Colis set goals to:

• Offer next-day premium deliveries.
• Expand its network of delivery and pickup locations, which it refers to as “relay points.”
• Enhance its portfolio to business-to-business (B2B) deliveries.

SAS Visual Analytics was the cornerstone of these efforts. By empowering users to access, combine, clean and prepare their own data in an agile way, SAS Visual Analytics facilitated faster, broader adoption of augmented analytics throughout Relais Colis.

“Once analytics was established in operations management, SAS was extended to all the other departments within the company, including marketing and sales,” Radenac says. “This translated into new use cases to master.”

In 2022, Relais Colis joined Walden Group, a well-established European health products distributor with a presence in 16 countries. A new entity – Walden Express International – was established, which Relais Colis is now a part of. Walden Express International addresses B2B markets through Ciblex, while Relais Colis handles business-to-consumer (B2C) and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) deliveries.

Relais Colis’ data department is working to reproduce its analytics models on the Ciblex entity dedicated to B2B deliveries. “We have ensured that the IT departments of the two entities are able to communicate, and we are committed to replicating on Ciblex what we have achieved in the field of analytics at Relais Colis,” Radenac says.

Impressive growth

As its data-driven culture grew, so did Relais Colis’ network of delivery and pickup locations.

“We quickly went from having 5,000 relay points to more than 7,500, and in 2024 we passed the 10,000 mark,” says Christophe Pantalacci, CIO of Relais Colis. “Using analytics, we can answer questions such as, ‘How can we position these relay points well?’ and ‘Which relays will bring us the most additional flows?’”

Relais Colis’ growth has been impressive. To put it into perspective, 92% of the French population now has a relay point within a 10-minute commute, making Relais Colis a convenient choice for shipping for individuals, small and midsize businesses, and large enterprises across France. 

“We work with major e-commerce companies that have solid data tools,” Radenac says. “They need to know that the service providers they use are efficient and knowledgeable about their organizations’ operations and performance. By understanding the data, we can assure our customers that our operations are data-driven and not the result of chance. We know precisely what we are doing and why we are doing it.”

Moving to the cloud, with an eye on the future

By migrating and modernizing with SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure, Relais Colis achieved several key advantages, including:

• Enhanced BI, AI and machine learning capabilities.
• Streamlined project management and improved efficiency.
• A scalable, flexible infrastructure to optimize resources and cost management.
• Improved data security with compliance requirements in mind.
• The ability to address immediate business needs while being positioned to take advantage of emerging technologies and trends to stay innovative and competitive.

“We are moving forward with great humility in our data mastery,” Pantalacci concludes. “We evaluate the benefits of SAS Viya for each new use case to ensure concrete, controlled solutions with real advantages for the company and our customers.”