First Mile Driver App.

Inspiration

What it does

The driveWay driver app allows dispatchers to share the supplier pickup routes they build each morning with their dedicated fleet of drivers. Drivers are able to see the stops along theroutes they are assigned to as well the POs they need to pick up. When drivers want to begin their route, we have provided the ability to call google maps and begin their trip to the supplier. For each stop drivers have the ability to mark if the are En Route, Arrived, Departed as well as what POs they picked up or were unable to get. There are two other data points that we allowed drivers to pass back to the dispatcher. First they can tell us the feet remaining in the truck so the dispatcher knows if there is enough space to route the truck to additional stops. Second is the ability to mark the number of pallets picked up. This is crucial as we have very poor visibility into what POs are on pallets and it requires an available forklift to unload the truck.

All of this data feed directly into our new dispatcher visibility tool which provides a map view of the current location of all of the drivers as well as a summary info of how they are progressing along their routes. At a glance, dispatchers, SOPs and First Mile Operations will know the status of all of their dedicated pickups. This is something that has never been available at Wayfair before. We will gain the ability to plan afternoon pickup routes as we will have accurate data of when our drivers are going to arrive at the pool point. Dispatchers will be able to proactively manage their drivers and pickups instead of relying on calls from their drivers or waiting for them to get back to the pool point. This will cut down on missed pickups which will bolster our supplier fill rate. The visibility the driver app and dispatcher tool provide is crucial as we head into peak as well as consider pooling Medium Parcel freight.

From the dispatcher view, dispatchers can also push the door or yard location to the drivers via the app. This is crucial for running an efficient yard at our pool points and cuts down on the time needed before we can send that driver out on another route.

Outside of these tools we also ran statistical analysis to better predict how long loading will take at each supplier. using Python and linear regression we predicted the time to load POs and pallets. This will improve the accuracy of our ETAs for multi stop routes.

How we built it

We built the driver app in React/Redux and intend to have it function as a mobile website. If this project was funded we plan to port it into React Native to run it on mobile devices. Both tools are built with a php back end.

Challenges we ran into

Calling the google API and populating our map view proved difficult, but was ultimately successfully.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the sleek timeline that we created for the dispatcher tool. Additionally, we are happy with how close to prod ready this app is. This app uses real data throughout and writes down data to existing tables at each step.