Editor’s note: Today's blog features Dirk Olufs, EVP and CTO, DHL Express. Dirk share how DHL Express integrated Google Maps Platform to expand B2C operations globally, improving delivery accuracy while empowering ~ 40,000 couriers with real-time navigation and intelligence.
DHL Express was built on a simple idea: get it there faster than anyone thought possible. In the early days, that meant founders carrying shipments by hand; within a few years, it meant racing bank documents across the Atlantic on Concorde to land in New York before the stock market opened. The technology was always whatever the promise required. When ecommerce arrived, and nearly half our 1.5 million daily shipments started heading to residential addresses — different every day, across 220 countries — the promise didn’t change. But the technology had to.
We needed to modernize a network built for one world to serve another. The challenge wasn't really technological. It was human. The core strength of DHL Express has always been its people — couriers who've been with us for decades, carrying knowledge no system can replicate. Which entrance to use, where to park, which buildings have a reception that closes at noon. Our job was never to replace that knowledge. It was to build technology worthy of it and bring people along with us.
A people-first business can also be a stubborn one. If technology tells a courier what to do for eight hours, that's a rough experience. So before we could scale anything, we had to win hearts and minds, and you can't do that top-down. It has to come from the ground up.
Building the foundation nobody sees
Back in 2009, somebody asked: Can we give our couriers navigation? The answer felt obvious — Google Maps Platform had figured something out. But over time, we realized the real problem wasn't really navigation, it was actually addresses.
Address structures vary wildly. In the Middle East, many locations have no postcodes, no street numbers, no building names — just landmarks. In dense Asian cities, couriers work from meet points rather than individual addresses. A customer shipping from Shanghai to Dubai might write the destination in a Chinese address structure. That address has to make sense to an English-speaking system, a courier in the UAE, and a recipient reading Arabic. Every step in that chain needs the right information in the right form.
Our legacy systems couldn't handle that complexity. And customers filling in a shipping form aren't trying to give us bad data; they just don't always know what good data looks like. So rather than fixing bad addresses when they reached the courier, we went back to the source.
Working with OniGroup, our Google Maps Platform implementation partner, we built DAVE, a DHL-specific address intelligence engine using Address Validation, Places API, and Geocoding. It validates and enriches addresses at the point of entry, telling us whether a location is residential or commercial, what the opening hours are, and where a courier should enter. It meant we could stop sending couriers to empty houses during work hours, or to office buildings after reception had closed. Small in isolation, but significant at our scale. Through DAVE, we've also moved from legacy infrastructure to a modern, containerized environment, cutting annual run costs by 75% and increasing deployment speed sevenfold.
Giving couriers a plan, not just a list
For years, our couriers worked from list views on their handheld devices — a column of stops, no map, no context, no way to visualize the day. All the routing knowledge was in their heads. A supervisor in Wembley, London, with 20 years' experience, knew how to organize 5,000 shipments across 40 drivers. When that person moved on, that knowledge went with them.
We wanted to change that without telling anyone what to do. Integrating Navigation SDK and Fleet Engine gave couriers turn-by-turn navigation on their Android devices and a live plan that reflects real-world conditions. But the part that mattered most was making it a two-way conversation. Couriers can now correct addresses directly on the device; if the system has it wrong, they can pin the right location, and that correction feeds back into the platform. Their tacit knowledge becomes part of the infrastructure.
When couriers saw the technology learning from them rather than just directing them, attitudes shifted. They see how it makes their lives easier. From someone who has done the job for two decades, that's not a small thing. We released capabilities incrementally — piloting in one country, gathering feedback, iterating — always with a wider vision in the background, but never asking people to accept it all at once. That approach is what made the difference between adoption and resistance.
How it adds up
When we started offering delivery time windows in 2021, we hit them around 50% of the time. We're now in the high 80s, approaching 90% in key markets. Follow My Parcel, launched in 2023, lets recipients track their courier's final stops on a delivery.
We're now piloting AI-powered Route Optimization with Google Maps Platform, analyzing thousands of shipments across dozens of vehicles to suggest plans that reduce travel time and distance. We present options, not orders. Couriers review, adjust, and provide feedback. The best outcomes will always combine what technology can compute with what our people know.
The longer vision is a seamless operation where address intelligence, navigation, real-time visibility, and route planning work as one. We've been building the foundations for several years, adapting the technology to the way DHL Express works rather than the other way around. The goal has never changed: get it there faster than anyone thought possible, and give the people who make that happen the tools they deserve.
