The Fifth Elephant winter edition 2019

In the world of real-time Logistics, every minute counts. It shows up not just as customer experience (SLA-Compliance & NPS), but also as the overall ability to accept N orders (Capacity) and deliver them in optimal time using minimum resources (efficiency). Such systems need to react fast to on-ground changes such as traffic, weather, availability of delivery-executives and their proximity to demand areas, availability of shipment at the source (in Swiggy’s case, prepared food at restaurants) etc. Both, real-time and historical data play a significant role in choosing “what” to optimize for and “how”. In this talk we discuss some of these challenges at Swiggy, the nature of historical and real-time data, and our journey of using these inputs in designing optimal solutions for Capacity (when exactly should we stop accepting orders) and Efficiency (orders/delivery-executive/unit-time). We also discuss challenges with data accuracy, high-variance and the necessary trade-offs in designing an optimial system.

Outline

1. Introduction and Context
   • The Capacity Problem - what is it; why it is important?
   • The Efficiency Problem - what, why and the necessary trade-offs
2. Data and its Nature
   • Challenges with Accurate Data Capture
   • Challenges with high Variance
   • Real-time Vs. historical data
3. Representing Capacity
   • Aggregated capacity (Zone-level)
   • Point-in-time-capacity (Order-level)
4. Journey and Results: Solving for Capacity
5. Efficiency Levers
   • Predictions and accounting for errors
   • Trade-offs
   • Optimal Assignment
   • Batching
6. Aggregate Analysis Vs. Specific Analysis
   • Pitfalls of Aggregate Analysis
7. Conclusions

Requirements

None

Speaker bio

Piyush works as Director Engineering, Delivery team, Swiggy. He is responsible for building tech platforms for real-time logistics. Prior to this he worked with Last Mile logistics division in Flipkart where he led the development of the Mapping solution and helped deliver last mile optimal-routing solutions.