Next-day deliveries in hand with analytics

Parcel delivery company Relais Colis adapts to online shopping revolution by using SAS^® Visual Analytics to automate reporting, shorten delivery times

Parcel shipping is a booming business. With the rise of e-commerce giants like Amazon, shippers are now tasked with delivering 75 billion parcels a year – 10 for every person on Earth – putting tremendous pressure on them to meet increasingly tight delivery windows. 

Relais Colis is the leading French delivery company for individuals. It touches nearly 40 million packages a year – 2 million delivered to residential addresses and the rest to 5,200 collection points scattered throughout France and Belgium. 

The company has been an innovation powerhouse since opening its doors half a century ago. It has adapted well to market shifts, and today Relais Colis is once again reinventing itself by using analytics to automate operations and shorten delivery times.

22,000 hours saved with automated reporting

Relais Colis is amid a five-year transformation project to meet the promise of next-day premium deliveries. It also plans to expand its delivery network to 8,000 collection points and enlarge its customer portfolio to include small business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer deliveries.

SAS Visual Analytics has become the cornerstone of this transformation, says Director of Performance and Processes Yann Radenac. “We had become absolute experts in Excel. But we pushed the program to its limits, and it was inevitable that we replace it with something better.”

Continuing its tradition of innovation, Relais Colis invested in SAS to modernize and simplify its reporting process. This was a necessary step. As the company has grown, reports have become increasingly sophisticated, some containing nearly 200 indicators. This strained both managers and the information systems staff, who were inundated with requests.

“Our managers aren’t supposed to just produce endless dashboards,” Radenac says. “We knew if we really wanted to achieve our ambitions, people had to get back to our core business.”  

With SAS Visual Analytics in place, reports are now KPI-focused and produced automatically. This allows branch managers to spend more time managing their teams and partners, while account managers no longer have to devote time to manually pulling numbers for client presentations.

In total, Radenac says reporting efficiencies have saved the company 22,000 hours a year, the equivalent of 12 full-time employees.

New insight on delivery fleet

Apart from modernizing its reporting, Relais Colis has used analytics to boost service quality. SAS Visual Analytics enables branch managers to better track vehicle fleets – which deliver up to 200,000 packages a day – in real time in two important ways. 

Before trucks leave for delivery, branch managers can now verify that subcontracted carriers have the necessary resources to deliver the assigned packages. “Until now, everything was done by mutual agreement, and if a problem arose, we had to deal with an emergency,” Radenac says. “Now, we’ve modernized the process to verify in advance if fleets are the right size. It’s a new kind of dialogue that helps us save time and be more efficient.” 

Then, once trucks are on the road, managers can see if packages are delivered properly. Again, SAS Visual Analytics has enabled stakeholders to take a proactive approach by using real-time data to anticipate excess loads and alert customers to changing delivery times if necessary.

Creating a culture of analytics

At Relais Colis, the adoption of analytics has infused the company with confidence to improve the customer experience in numerous areas. One such area is shipping labels: The company now allows customers to send or return a package without a label, using only a smartphone.

As for its new business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer solutions, analytics is helping the shipper manage logistics across the entire supply chain. “From picking up packages to routing them to the right platform to delivering them on time, SAS helps us optimize logistics all over the country,” Radenac says. 

The next step in the transformation project will be a strategic one. With online shopping reaching a fever pitch, the shipper will need to make increasingly fast decisions with significant money at stake: Should it open a new logistics platform? If so, where? And what size?

These multimillion-euro investments require an accurate business forecast. To make the right decisions, the company must anticipate buying trends, territory trends and activity spikes. “We need the tools to ask the right questions and make the right decisions,” Radenac says. “We will rely on analytics to guide this stage of our transformation.”