How Last Mile team influence the customer and employee experience at Mercadona
The main focus of a new Mercadona Tech’s Last Mile team will be scaling a routing solution for its delivery trucks and hives. Currently, we transport 800.000 units of products daily between five warehouses and nineteen supermarkets. There are a lot of challenges our new vertical needs to face: thousands of orders to deliver, an extensive area of operations and its peculiarities which we have to model to reassure the best service for our clients.
We offer one-hour slots for our orders which is something not that common in the market. For a customer-centric company that always tries to build a competitive advantage around outstanding service quality, this commitment puts additional pressure on our delivery operations.
The demand is not homogenous or static in order size, order location, or address delivery complexity. While in the Hive, the production of three thousands orders is not that affected by many changing factors, when we talk about delivery, the combination of the above variables, plus others, can lead to very different outcomes every day that we need to be able to manage appropriately. We have to account for all these factors while planning our trucks’ routes, admits Javier Querol, our CPO.
On the other side, our warehouses have a limited dispatch capacity, and we have to adjust the routing to the mentioned circumstances. Although the new team will be located in Madrid, it will be responsible for the routing solution in the whole country. We are working on expanding our service to Castellón, Alicante, and Seville in the near future; therefore, we have an ambition to enlarge our Product team.
The environment in our Hive is easier to control, the processes are established, and we are well aware of all that is going on. We created plenty of solutions and applications to facilitate the operations workflow. What happens on the road is a constant challenge. We can’t predict what might arise. We need to consider factors like traffic and weather, which may influence the process. The conditions are considerably less controllable.
Moreover, by planning the delivery route, we create a work schedule for our colleagues, our delivery team. The ability to define that part well improves employee experience and gives better work conditions for our staff. We not only try to provide the best solution for our clients. We genuinely want to implement changes in the organisation. We have a strong desire to improve our drivers’ work environment.
The secret to delighting the customer
The Last Mile team will work on the profitability and productivity of our operations while guaranteeing the expected service level of our routes, which we like to see as having two different key dimensions. One is focused on the client and another one on an employee. We try to measure enough time between delivery slots so our staff can take their break, work efficiently and provide the best experience for our Jefe, as we call our customer. This way, we create an environment where the client and an employee both feel satisfied. The proper planning of the workday for our delivery staff decreases their stress levels. It facilitates the optimal route schedule, with indications from the team and the client.
Mario Pardo, a delivery man in our Valencia hive, admits that the routes are well calculated and that it’s beneficial to see their colleague’s feedback on the route map. He mentions the tips as: an access with no lift in the building, exact location coordinates to park the truck or additional insights like a name of the nearby business to locate the destination better. Here the details are crucial, and for example, the input about the lift lets us adjust the planning to the actual conditions encountered in the buildings or on the road.
Mario also feels engaged and open to giving feedback about his work. The process must maintain constant communication with the people on the ground, who experience the product team’s progress daily.
Our Product team works on improvements to be visible externally for the client, mainly in punctuality and orders appropriately fulfilled in form and content. Still, the principal part of their job will make a workday better for our employees working in the warehouse.
The employee experience translates directly into customer satisfaction, and we need to make sure we innovate, create new solutions, and become better every day.
Our Last Mile team in Mercadona Tech is two years old. Before that, we were working with a third-party technological solution, but as the project was escalating, it was decided to strategically replace it with a 100% in-house developed solution that would allow us to have the level of customisation and disruption we aspire for operations and business.
In these two years, the team has been focused on laying the foundations of this solution, solving the prominent use cases of our distribution model, and guaranteeing its adoption up to practically 100% of the orders we serve daily. Nowadays, this routing solution generates almost 600 daily routes that move through the three cities we serve (Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia).
We are proud of the decision made two years ago and of having reached this point, but as we have learned and delved into the problem, we have been discovering everything that we still need to do. We have been coming up with an infinite number of ideas that, with talent and focus, we are sure that they can bring us closer to the ambition we mentioned above: to be truly disruptive and innovative.
We are convinced that we can achieve the desired results building a diverse environment and structuring our tribes in smaller and more focused teams.These mentioned have ownership over the products developed and work with agile methodologies to ensure the best experience for our employees and finally for our clients.
