The Challenge
"First mile" in logistics refers to the initial pickup leg—when trucks arrive at customer warehouses to collect shipments and transport them to sortation facilities. For a major global shipper, this meant coordinating roughly 3,000 touchpoints daily across large metropolitan markets.
The problem: this operation had never been touched by data analytics. Zero visibility. No capacity reporting. No route optimization. No forecasting. Dispatchers were essentially working blind, making decisions based on experience and guesswork.
The result was chronic inefficiency. Trucks were running at just 40% capacity—meaning more than half of every truck's potential was wasted on every route. In an operation this size, that waste translated to tens of millions in unnecessary costs.
Our Approach
This was a greenfield project. There was no existing data infrastructure to improve—we had to build everything from scratch. That's actually harder than fixing something broken, because there are no guardrails and no baseline to measure against.
We led the greenfield implementation, starting with one major metropolitan market to prove the concept before scaling.
The Solution
Over the course of a year, we built a complete first mile analytics platform:
Data Foundation
- Created integrations to capture pickup data from dispatch systems, driver apps, and customer portals
- Built ETL pipelines in Python and .NET to normalize data from disparate sources
- Established Azure Data Lake as the central repository
Analytics Engine
- Developed forecasting models to predict pickup volumes by location and time
- Built route optimization algorithms in Databricks to maximize truck utilization
- Created capacity planning tools to right-size fleet allocation by market
Operational Reporting
- Deployed Power BI dashboards for dispatchers and operations managers
- Built real-time capacity monitoring to flag underutilized routes
- Created executive reporting to track savings and optimization progress
The Results
In the first metropolitan market alone, route capacity jumped from 40% to 83%—more than doubling efficiency. That single market generated $9 million in savings in 2025.
The success of Phase 1 unlocked approval for Phase 2, which will expand the platform to additional markets in 2026. Projected savings: $22 million as the optimized routing scales across the network.
This engagement demonstrates what's possible when you bring modern data infrastructure to operations that have been running on intuition. The data was always being generated—it just wasn't being captured, connected, or acted upon.
Sometimes the biggest wins come from the areas everyone assumed were "just how things work."