Cutting Delivery Times with Naurt: £499k per Year Saved

tl;dr using Naurt on a delivery fleet of 1,000 drivers earning industry standard wages could save you up to £9600 a week (£499,200 a year).

‍In order to direct delivery drivers to an address, to place a marker on a map showing where an address is, it is necessary to geocode the address. Geocoding is the process of converting a human readable address like "51 Park Avenue" into a location such as "51.289, -1.064".

‍The issue with geocoders is that they are agnostic to the business use case. In general, geocoders return the centre of an address. Usually the centre of the roof footprint. However, for delivery drivers this is not helpful. While it will take them to the approximate location they need to go, the delivery driver does not need to go to the building roof centre. In fact, the driver first needs to find somewhere to park and then after leaving the vehicle only then do they need to be guided to the address itself. Furthermore, the most useful place to be guided is not the building roof centre but instead the door.

‍Generally, most routing and ETA tools do not take into account the discrepancy between how drivers need to physically act (navigating to a parking spot; then delivering to an address) and the data the system is giving them (directions to the building in general). As such, ETA tools are often inaccurate. Inaccurate ETA times are frustrating for customers. They also make route planning difficult for businesses. 

‍According to Chiara and Goodchild in 2020's paper Do commercial vehicles cruise for parking? Empirical evidence from Seattle the time taken for a delivery driver to find parking can account for 28% of the trip time. This is often overlooked, even by those in the industry. In our experience, most people are shocked that the value is so high. Therefore, having the ability to direct drivers to parking spots holds huge potential for delivery businesses. The list of benefits from reducing that cruising time is golden: lower labour costs, greater delivery capacity, more accurate ETA times and greater customer satisfaction.

‍Naurt approached the problem by tackling the key issue. Rather than an industry agnostic geocoder that gives the general location of an address, Naurt provides information relevant to the delivery driver. Naurt provides an appropriate space to park as well as an entrance to the building.

‍In this simulation, we selected a series of random addresses. We used an urban area approximating what a delivery company may have to deliver to a day. We did a benchmark with the results from a normal geocoder. Then we did four additional scenarios: one with Naurt but assuming Naurt saves no time, then three using Naurt assuming it saves an average of 5 seconds, 15 seconds and 30 seconds per delivery.

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The above table shows the percentage improvement in route time. Even if Naurt does not save drivers any time, using the parking spot as a final driving destination can improve efficiency by 1.57%. Even saving 5s on average increases delivery efficiency by 2% - which is rather significant in the scope of a large delivery company.

The below graph shows the same data, but in absolute time rather than relative improvements.

As we saw, using Naurt and saving 5s per delivery on average can lead to a 2% improvement in delivery efficiency. Remembering that drivers spend 28% of their time cruising for parking, we can assume that significant time savings are possible. Therefore, this is not an unreasonable saving.

If for a moment we take the 2% improvement and run a quick thought experiment. Assume 1000 delivery drivers working 40 hours a week each. A 2% improvement would be equal to 800 labour hours a week saved in this scheme. Assuming a salary of £12/hr, a typical rate in the sector, that is equal to £9600 in wages. 

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If you would like to explore how Naurt can help your business, please don't hesitate to reach out at sales@naurt.com. You can also make an account on our dashboard at dashboard.naurt.com. The dashboard requires no credit card on sign up and comes loaded with thousands of free address lookups a month.

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