Editor’s note: Today’s article comes from Rajesh Venkatesan, Chief Technology Officer at FreshDirect. Venkatesan shares how FreshDirect is using Google Maps Platform Route Optimization API to transform last-mile delivery of fresh foods for its customers in the greater New York City metropolitan area.
From farm to door, here at FreshDirect we’ve been delivering fresh and locally grown foods to customers in the greater New York City metropolitan area since 2002. We serve businesses and residents in dense urban cities, like Manhattan in New York City, and suburban areas, like Camden, New Jersey. Our key differentiator is that we give our customers the ability to select two-hour delivery windows, and we guarantee our Express Delivery customers groceries within two hours of placing an order.
We use trucks, passenger cars, and walkers (or “runners”) to ensure our customers receive their groceries within the requested timeframe. Route optimization is mission critical for our business. Drivers need to navigate around rush hour congestion and construction while avoiding obstacles, such as truck-restricted pathways.
When our decade old legacy routing system could no longer adapt to changing business needs and continuously evolving customer expectations, we evaluated three options for upgrading our system: subscribing to a platform as a service (PaaS), building a solution from scratch, or taking a hybrid approach by leveraging a maps platform and building our own stateful logic.
FreshDirect delivers fresh and locally grown foods to customers in the greater New York City metropolitan area.
PaaS would‘ve been too expensive given our delivery volume, and building from scratch would’ve taken too much time to develop. We selected a hybrid approach to modernizing our system with the Google Maps Platform Route Optimization API, supported by Google Cloud Premier Partner Master Concept, and our custom logic. We get the best of both worlds: access to the platform’s routing intelligence and the ability for our team to tailor decision rules.
Dynamically optimizing routes based on real-time demands and capacity
Google Maps Platform gives us access to the massive, real-world travel data available from Google Maps. Using AI/machine learning (ML) to find optimal paths means we can re-plan routes dynamically for anticipated traffic, detours and closures, which is something no other vendor could provide. We’re able to tailor routing for Manhattan congestion, for example, while taking into account any blockers and driver capacity.
We can also adjust vehicle speed, capacities, and delivery windows dynamically using the API’s customizable parameters. This helps make the routing engine more accurate, reliable, and efficient. The Route Optimization API enables automated routing for both next-day and same-day deliveries, so we can move away from zone-based routing, which limits drivers or trucks to a pre-defined area. With a zoneless approach, we’re able to assign orders to whichever vehicle is already nearby or en route.
We use the Route Optimization API to calculate optimal routes while our internal systems manage planning variables. These variables include available trucks for a region or a zone, capacity for each truck, delivery mode such as by car, truck or walk, managing delivery time slot availability, monitoring ongoing deliveries, and ensuring we abide by local business and traffic rules.
Efficient routing creates opportunity to take more customer orders
We chose a progressive approach to implementation to avoid disrupting daily deliveries. Rolling out the new system in stages allows us to learn, refine, and helps us ensure our committed service levels. We can tune our custom logic as we go, ensuring a smooth transition to full adoption.
We started with Express Delivery and then incorporated time slot availability checks to ensure we match orders to real vehicle capacity in real time. We’re currently 70% on the new system and plan to reach 100% rollout within three months.
FreshDirect guarantees its Express Delivery customers groceries within two hours of placing an order.
Since its implementation, we’ve made our routing more efficient — making routes denser, optimizing stop sequences within a timeslot, and estimating planned delivery times more accurately when taking orders, which results in significantly improved on-time deliveries. We’ve also reduced the time it takes to route approximately 1,000 orders from 40 minutes to less than a minute, bringing our routing operations to nearly real-time.
Seamless collaboration from the Google Maps Platform product team
Working with both the Google Maps Platform and Master Concept teams was a great experience. Our questions and concerns were addressed quickly, and the tech team at Master Concept was very supportive and accountable throughout the process.
We also had direct access to Google product teams, which made it easy to get fast, solution-focused answers. We were able to talk directly to the people who understood exactly what we were trying to build and guided us on how to reach our goals of modernizing routing, improving delivery accuracy, and scaling operations efficiently.
Leveraging AI/ML to modernize the retail experience
Our next step is to use the data we’ve collected to plan smarter. By looking at our historical deliveries, we can predict the number of trucks, drivers, and walkers we need for different areas and times of day. We also want the system to learn more about how long deliveries take over time, because dropping off groceries at a high-rise is very different from a single-family home. Over time, these insights will help us plan resources more efficiently and improve delivery accuracy.
We’re also expanding our partnership with Google by migrating key applications and workloads to Google Cloud. This transition of our on-premises applications allows us to leverage AI and ML technologies from Google, which is a market leader in applying modern technologies across the retail value chain. Leveraging Google’s technology also provides positive value for technology resources, as they’ll have an opportunity to work with leading edge tech.
Since this transition, we’ve reduced costs, improved our team’s efficiency, and created room for new growth. And most importantly, we’re delivering fresh food to our customers on time. As FreshDirect continues to evolve, we remain committed to using the best technologies to serve our customers with premium foods delivered whenever they need them.
