Halfords drives last mile

Automotive products retailer Halfords has begun using a new last mile delivery solution

Halfords has partnered with Descartes to enable dynamic delivery pricing in its customer-facing mobile tire replacement service and as its new international field service software solution called Avayler.

Descartes’ last mile delivery solution provides an end-to-end platform for home and last mile delivery operations.

The solution spans delivery appointment booking, route planning and execution, mobile proof-of-delivery (POD) and notifications processes. Its delivery appointment schedule is dynamically generated for each customer and time window options are scored.

Costs

This allows organisations such as Halfords to intelligently control the booking process, which maximises booking density and productivity and enhances the customer experience while minimising costs.

“As part of our innovative ecommerce-based mobile tire replacement service, we wanted to more accurately reflect the logistics cost of the mobile service when customers were booking service appointments and balance demand with our ability to serve customers,” said Chris McShane from at Halfords. “Extending Descartes’ dynamic scheduling solution into Avayler made perfect sense. The solution will allow garages, distributors and other service-based organisations to provide their customer base with unique service appointment pricing as they are making purchases and the ability to optimise customer demand.”

First metrics show that Halford’s mobile service business has already been able to improve gross profit by 5% and reduce miles per delivery by 13%.