+4% in time slots compliance: an interview with Vincent Perret, Director of Operations, DPD France
- October 12, 2023
- 2 mins
Kardinal supports DPD France in the digitization and optimization of its business. A key player in parcel delivery, DPD France is using Kardinal’s solution to optimize the sectorization of its delivery centers’ areas, as well as its routes.
Vincent Perret, Director of Operations at DPD France, answered our questions about the implementation of the project.
Kardinal: Hello Vincent, can you introduce yourself and DPD France?
Vincent Perret: Hello, I’m Vincent Perret, Director of Operations for the DPD France group for the past two years. My role is to manage operations from the first-mile to the end customer, which includes 70 delivery centers and 5 hubs throughout France. DPD France draws its DNA from a strong entrepreneurial history. The company’s mission is to deliver more than 400,000 parcels every day, 70% B2B and 30% B2C. COVID-19 has had a significant impact on our B2C business.
K: What are the challenges facing your industry?
VP: The transportation and logistics industry is confronted with many challenges linked to the climate crisis, a difficult labor market, the complexity of last-mile delivery, artificial intelligence, as well as major administrative constraints and regulations imposed on companies. More specifically, parcel delivery and routing, especially over the last mile, raises major challenges in terms of managing addresses and delivery locations. Post-COVID-19, consumer habits have been profoundly disrupted and transformed, forcing us to rethink our distribution model.
K: How is Kardinal helping DPD France meet these challenges?
VP: Because of its history, DPD France has relied heavily on its employees and their local knowledge. With the challenges facing the industry, we had to move from an intuitive approach to a model-based one. To achieve this, we set up a program dedicated to operational excellence, aimed at improving performance in a number of areas. To overcome our teams’ concerns about using new tools, it was essential to involve them in building the solution, and provide them with a decision-making tool adapted to their needs.
DPD France then decided to work with Kardinal to optimize the last-mile sectorization process, making work easier for our 600 in-house drivers and 4,000 subcontracted drivers. The solution also gave us the capacity to meet the challenges of parcel variations that we encountered from one period to another (for example: 40% difference in volume between the beginning and end of the week). The market’s instability and the constraints we face (strikes, weather conditions, time of year, etc.) mean that we need to ensure organizational stability. Kardinal’s solution enables us to model our activity in a predictive way, and to adapt our resources depending on demand.
K: Why did you choose Kardinal's solution?
VP: Two elements were decisive in choosing the right solution. Firstly, Kardinal’s software adapted perfectly to our operational constraints, as well as to the managerial conditions required for the deployment of our network. Secondly, Kardinal’s support of the operational teams in the field was essential, providing them with valuable support throughout the implementation of the solution.
K: What benefits have you seen from using Kardinal?
VP: The world around us requires us to constantly adjust our resources as the customer, the recipient and their needs and expectations evolve. Thanks to Kardinal, we’ve been able to better meet our commitments to our customers. For example, our Predict home delivery service achieved a 4% improvement in time slot compliance.
Kardinal helped us professionalize last-mile delivery by transforming our delivery drivers into professional drivers. We have succeeded in bringing a managerial change in the behavior and attitude of all our drivers, whether in-house or subcontracted. This decision-making software has also enabled us to eliminate certain irritants by facilitating the work of our employees, and to generate more value for our customers.
K: What are the future projects or prospects involving the use of Kardinal's solution at DPD France?
VP: In addition to area modeling, Kardinal’s solution has enabled us to take on a number of new projects, including data collection and optimization (information on recipients, kilometers traveled, etc.), activity prediction, route scheduling and one-hour time slot delivery.
