The festive season fast approaches and many logistics, freight and delivery companies are preparing for their busiest season ahead. The ever-growing sector of e-commerce, which accounted for 19% of retail sales worldwide, depends on these providers to serve their customer orders and get their holiday deliveries on time.

Logistics, freight and delivery networks are large, dynamic and complex. They require the management of hundreds, if not thousands, of locations, systems and processes. Not only does inadequate use of data and analytics delay decision-making, it leads to disadvantages in competitiveness, increases costs and ultimately disrupts the customer experience.

Consequently, operationalizing large-scale data usage in real-time across the shipping network is an essential business requirement to meet the needs of the season.

The pressure is on to deliver for the holidays

Time, visibility and reliability are the critical attributes customers look for in their delivery process.

With the ongoing movement of packages and merchandise across state and international lines, achieving those three attributes relies on real-time, consistent access to data. Lacking the data sophistication to detect delays and notify customers in time can quickly cause reputational risk.

As shipping and logistics organizations generate such a large number of transactions on a daily basis, and require specific latency requirements to make timely decisions across the delivery network, a solution that can handle high-volumes of data and enable real-time access is integral to meeting the needs of customers.

So what does that look like in practice? I always think of these three great examples of shipping and logistic organizations leveraging Fivetran.

Pitney Bowes tracks 800M+ parcels in real time with Fivetran

Pitney Bowes lacked high-quality, real-time data they needed to make critical business decisions. Their Enterprise Information Management [EIM] team faced three challenges: siloed data, lack of scalability and inefficient tech spending.

Moving to a cloud data platform like Fivetran paid off quickly and eliminated multiple constraints. Fivetran replaced all of its custom batch scripts and extract, transform, load (ETL) processes. The team used Fivetran’s out-of-the-box connectors to quickly build pipelines for several business-critical apps like SAP, Salesforce, Facebook, Kafka and Kinesis.

This helped Pitney Bowes move high volumes of data and eliminated its infrastructure bottlenecks. For the first time ever, they had efficient and real-time data delivery for all of their facilities, vehicles and parcels, including 16 global distribution centers and 800M+ packages per day.

“When we introduced Fivetran to our facilities’ data processing, it revolutionized the flow and we were able to achieve near real-time data from all 16 sites at the same time. I can now understand all the site operational metrics in one single pane of glass and track an individual package to find out where it is currently.”
Vishal Shah, Data Architect Manager at Pitney Bowes

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DPD Polska delivers 200M parcels annually with Fivetran

DPD Polska — part of DPDGroup, the second largest international courier network across 50 countries — is the leader of the Polish courier market, delivering 200 million parcels annually. They were using a series of on-premise PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server databases to track their trucks, parcels and people.

They used Fivetran for real time data replication from their database sources to lower the risk of manual data distribution and enable accelerated decisions using data — including tracking missing deliveries and reporting on business critical intel.

“Our business team has real-time analytics and our technical team has a real-time disaster-recovery copy of our data, all thanks to Fivetran”
Tomasz Pruss, IT Operations Director, DPD Polska

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MyParcel delivers on-time across the Netherlands with Fivetran

MyParcel is the largest and most popular shipping service in the Netherlands.

MyParcel had multiple data sources but were only bringing data from its own production database into Snowflake. Fivetran helped them integrate their data from multiple sources, including SFTP which it uses to load its Cendris data, into Snowflake for a full view of the MyParcel marketing funnel and customer journey.

This has proven critical as the business moved operations online, with agile analytics enabling quick turnaround of up-to-date reporting back to the business.

“We have more and cleaner data since bringing on Fivetran and because of that, people are incorporating data in their decision process.”
Martin Bakels, Data Analyst, MyParcel

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While these three organizations differ in infrastructure and even region, their objectives all remain similar: use their data to improve efficiency and effectiveness of their delivery network. The speed and reliability that Fivetran provides help them deliver this holiday season, both literally and figuratively.