Summary
The package brought to your door may have crossed the globe - but the most expensive and fiddly bit of the journey will undoubtedly be what's known as 'the last mile'. Delivery firms are constantly innovating how they do this - using electric vehicles and e cargo bikes, robots, or offering customers a click and collect option at a local store of their choice. Consumers take it for granted that they will get free delivery in many cases. But is the whole 'last mile' industry sustainable? Delivery vans add to traffic congestion and consumers are ordering more than they need and returning unwanted goods for free.
Evan Davis and guests discuss the latest trends in the logistical puzzle of 'the last mile.'
Guests
Jon Ormond Operations Director of Hubs and Depots at parcel carrier, Hermes. Nick Hale, Managing Director of BT Ventures. and Catherine Weetman, founder of Re-think solutions.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the programme. |
| 0:07.8 | The Last Mile sounds like the title of some epic tale of personal struggle, a journey |
| 0:12.4 | beyond the limits of endurance, but in business the term has a more prosaic association. |
| 0:17.8 | Modern economies are built upon networks. |
| 0:20.3 | Think of phone lines. You have the big |
| 0:22.1 | national cables linking town cities and countries, but when they arrive in a town, they're useless |
| 0:27.4 | until they're connected over the last mile to an actual house. And it's this last mile that is |
| 0:33.0 | the more complicated, more expensive bit of the network. Or think about freight and logistics. It's easy to |
| 0:39.2 | get a container of t-shirts from a port in China to a port in Europe and even to a distribution |
| 0:43.9 | warehouse and a parcel centre, but harder to take one specific t-shirt the last mile to a |
| 0:50.8 | particular house. Again, the last mile is the most expensive. So that is what we want to |
| 0:55.5 | think about today, mostly in terms of deliveries in an era of online shopping. How do we get |
| 1:01.5 | products to people that last mile? We're going to draw on other networks as well, though, |
| 1:05.7 | with systems that match core A roads attached to smaller side roads. |
| 1:11.4 | My guests will help us understand the challenge of the last mile, so let's meet them. |
| 1:15.6 | And first up is John Ormond, operations director of hubs and depots at the parcel carrier Hermes. |
| 1:21.8 | Just tell us about Hermes, first of all, John, and who owns it and how it operates. |
| 1:26.6 | Yeah, Hermes is operated by the Otto Group, based in Germany. |
| 1:30.3 | And we've seen phenomenal growth over the last five years, 76% based on this e-commerce market |
| 1:35.7 | where we all want our lives to run and we just like to order online. |
| 1:40.2 | We have a network of 26 depots and three hubs, and we distribute products to the doors of us here and millions around us. |
| 1:49.6 | We carry 384 million parcels a year. So on an average day, we're handling around about one and a half million parcels. |
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