ATLAS - Rakuten Intelligence Logistics
Company:
Rakuten Intelligence
Role:
Design Lead
Team:
1 Design, 1 PdM, 1 PjM
Project Year:
2018 (2 weeks)
A sprint project demonstrating how prospect carrier clients can leverage rakuten intelligence’s shipping data
Atlas is a product concept leveraging the tremendous shipping data from Rakuten Intelligence’s 6M shopper panel. Our clients can improve their routing efficiency through the visibility on each purchase’s click-to-ship and ship-to-door details, with item/order attributes tied to each package, across 27+ carriers.
Business Opportunity
Although e-commerce have been around for more than two decades, yet the impact on the supply chain hasn't evolved much until the past few years. Consumers' expectations around product variety and delivery times and convenience have increased dramatically (thanks to Amazon), but their willingness to pay for fast shipping has declined, with 64 percent unwilling to pay anything extra for two-day shipping. The average click-to-door speed has only improved a little from 5.9 days in 2015 to 4 days in 2017. No one in logistics has figured out yet - even Amazon lost $7.2 billion from shipping in 2016.
Our data has a rarely powerful visibility on each purchase’s click-to-door steps with item/order attributes, across 27+ carriers. And it costs almost zero extra Data Engineering efforts because logistics data have already been parsed and sit in our data set.
Use Cases
1. Commercial Real Estate: They want to identify growing warehousers/distributors in different markets and optimize the capacity utilization.
2. Retailers: They want know how they can strategically place their inventory so the items can be moved cheaper and faster than competitors (with the same products).
3. Logistics Companies: They want to determine which routes/markets and merchants are growing and win the share over competitors in those markets.
Brainstorming MVP
The 3-person SWAT team (Analyst/Product-owner, Operation, Design) spent 1 sprint to explore, brainstorm and scope MVP. After several interviews, we learned that when improving the routing efficiency, it always came down to two key components: warehouse/distribution location and transportation between facilities. The focus of MVP would be how we visualize the click-to-door's route to improve the routing efficiency.
Prototype
Below is the MVP prototype we came up with. The InVision version is available here.
Clicking on a warehouse opens a tooltip of logistics details going through this location. The user can click “See routes through here” to see a Routes overview chart.
In Routes overview chart, all shipping details going through this warehouse are visualized. The efficiency of each warehouse is also visualized in a vertical meter next to each node.
The user can also switch the view to see all routes in this market. Hovering on a node (warehouse) to see how it performs in different shippings.
The user can switches to see the line/bar chart view broken down by Brand, Carrier, Category, Market or Retailer.
Outcome
Although every person from our interviews showed a great interest in our logistics data (5 logistics companies, 2 big retailers), raw data was the only thing they needed because they were all capable of analyzing data in-house.
The company launched this data set as a product (named Atlas) in early 2019 and plans to interview more different types of clients (ex: smaller retailers) to learn if there is product needs in the industry.
