When Near Enough Isn’t Good Enough

Addressing The Last Mile Logistics Challenge

Last Mile Logistics

For businesses operating home delivery last mile fulfilment can be the difference between success and failure.

Logistics is one of the UK’s fastest growing sectors, worth over £688 billion a year and has seen a 60%  year-on-year growth rate as consumer spending habits change as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Last mile delivery accounts for nearly 53% of the total supply chain costs. Delivering to the right address quickly will help free up time for more drop-offs, strengthen profit margins and boost customer loyalty.

Addresscloud's API technology matches addresses to rooftop level coordinates using high quality data from the Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey in the UK and Eircode in Ireland, ensuring drivers are sent to the exact doorway, first time and on time.

Addresscloud is an integral part of our logistics system. Its accuracy and reliability enable our drivers to effectively deliver our fresh organic produce from farm to doorstep, as well as enabling support and guidance to some of our relief drivers during this extra busy lockdown period.

Sue Jones, Co-Owner and Head of Business Systems
Riverford Organic Farmers (May 2020)

The Last Mile Logistics Challenge

Addresses are complex. Existing addressing solutions struggle to locate named properties, mixed commercial and residential units, and flats. When an address can’t be found a postcode is often used, meaning that a driver isn’t directed to a specific drop point but must manually search for a property or contact the customer for directions. Furthermore, because the national address register in Great Britain changes daily, addressing solutions must be updated frequently to keep up with changing postcodes and new developments.

Here’s an example highlighting delivery addressing issues recently trending on LinkedIn. The owner of Two Burrow resorted to writing his own sign.

Whilst a driver may easily navigate to a postcode in a standard residential street, where there’s a choice of a few houses, this doesn’t work so well in rural areas where a postcode may cover properties spread out over large remote areas, concealed from view or located down long tracks.

Here we highlight the complexities of last mile delivery. We accurately identify the location of this Farmhouse in Kent with a pin using Addresscloud’s geocoding solution. This is then compared with alternative geocoding solutions that fail to properly locate the property and would send the driver several miles away.

The same property search in Google Maps fails to match the full address and instead places the pin 5.3 miles and a nine-minute drive away from the actual property location.

Some address systems simply locate the postcode, in this case the centre of the postcode is a one minute’s drive away. But once again this isn’t near enough, especially when properties are obscured from view or are one of many isolated properties spread out over a large area.  This is likely to lead to a call to the customer costing the business both time and money.

And let’s not forget that spelling errors or incorrect postcodes mean that a package is even more likely to end up at the wrong destination or be returned undelivered to the depot.  Addresscloud features fuzzy matching to fix typos and correct postcodes.

The Solution

Addresscloud has developed a very fast, scalable and accurate address validation and geocoding platform that intelligently reads and understands all forms of addresses and translates these into the correct address and locates them with letterbox level accuracy.

Addresscloud utilises the very latest in cloud technology, national address registers and deep domain expertise in addressing and geocoding to create a reliable web platform to solve this last mile logistics challenge.

Addresscloud's API technology will validate, match and geocode addresses to rooftop level and has the speed and capacity to deliver thousands of responses a second with sub half-second response times.

With six-weekly updates (daily updates are planned from 1st July) and combining data from the Ordnance Survey and Royal Mail, Addresscloud enables customers to access accurate and current addresses on a national scale.

The Last Mile Challenge Solved

With online orders and customer expectations for speed not showing any sign of slowing down, focusing efforts on perfecting last mile logistics operations is becoming ever more vital.

Addresscloud, with its accurate and proven addressing technology, is already helping organisations solve this challenge by producing an exact front door coordinate to increase cost-savings, customer satisfaction and the competitive advantage they seek.

To find out how our addressing data solution can improve your delivery efficiency email us at hello@addresscloud.com