delivery plus - boost service efficiency

“Delivery Plus” is a social project based on fixxpert.org. Fixperts creates content that encourages people to use the power of creative thinking to solve everyday problems for others. During this project, we worked with Fan Zhao from Yuantong Express and helped him improve the previous low efciency delivery system on campus to a new high efficiency system. 

CREDIT:JIE YANG, KEYU GUO, MO ZHANG, BO CHEN | DURATION: 10 WEEKS

Alibaba and chinese shipping industry

One of the challenges for Chinese e-commerce companies —Alibaba being the largest—is that while some consolidation has come lately, the Chinese shipping industry is still fragmented into lots of small companies that ferociously compete to undercut each other on price, and timeliness and package care often suffer.

When it comes to delivery packages to campus with large number of orders everyday, there is no pre-defined service system but some employee generated solutions to increase efficiency and work load. A better defined service at distribution location on campus will dramatically increase service satisfaction and create customer loyalty over other companies.

THE old system

Due to the amount of packages sent to campus, it is not possible to deliver every package to recipient door to door. All packages were centralized at an open area on campus and the delivery personal will send text message to ask customers come pick their package.

All packages are separated into two piles, people with 2 character in their name or people with 3 character in their name. Last names are written on the package for easy recognition however it's still hard to read and last names are very repetitive in Chinese.

The new SYSTEM

We think Chinese words are not easy to read in a distance instead of numbers. It is also more efficient to write a number which comes from mobile phone number outside the package and a number is more unique than a Chinese word. In our new system, we decide to use last two digits of a mobile number so it is 1% chance to have one repetition in 100 packages.  We also decide to divide all packages into 3 piles based on numbers: Pile Left: 00-39Pile Mid: 40-69Pile Right:70-99.

IMPLEMENTATION

For the instructions, considering this site is exposed to outdoor environment and all the signs need to be durable for storing, transporting, lying on ground and most importantly easy to read. We decide to use a piece stainless steel about 30 cm by 60 cm and bend it in middle into 45 degree angel. This material is cheap, durable for any weather condition and strong enough for many years. Outside the stainless steel, we print a piece of paper saying “last 2 no xx-xx” in big size of font.(numbers are bigger than letters.) We adhere tapes to it in order to prevent any water or dirt.