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Following Amazon’s two-hour Prime Now Delivery service in 2018, Walmart recently launched a similar Express Delivery service. Express Delivery analyzes customer orders through the AI system, classifies them according to different Delivery addresses, weather conditions and purchased items, and provides door-to-door Delivery services within 2 hours.
Walmart officials said that while some of the Delivery capabilities in Express Delivery were already in place before the AI features were developed, the AI prediction system had to be built from the ground up, and the AI platform could prioritize online orders from more than 74,000 shoppers.
The Express Delivery service was piloted in 100 U.S. stores in mid-April, and Wal-Mart plans to expand the test to 1,000 stores this month and 2,000 later.
AI predicts Delivery time and confirms whether Express Delivery is provided
The Express Delivery isn’t just a response to the popularity of the Novel Coronavirus, which has more than 160,000 items in its warehouses, Wal-Mart said. The high volume of order deliveries prompted the company to improve Delivery efficiency.
While testing in stores, the team behind Express Delivery continues to develop scalable follow-on products that will be optimized for deployment in large stores.
Customers will be able to choose when their order will arrive after choosing the product on Walmart’s website or via its mobile app. Under the background of the system, an AI system that includes “resource optimization and vehicle route selection” will determine whether a user meets the conditions for Express Delivery based on a series of real-time factors. Orders that meet the requirements must be $30 or more, plus a $10 shipping fee.
In order to optimize the route and allocation for car delivery schedule, received orders to ensure that the user selected time, AI system on the time slot, assigned to the time of orders, the available vehicles, vehicle type, stores and the distance between the shipping address, bad weather, and so on and so forth, comprehensive analysis from these variables in order to estimate the delivery time.
In addition, the AI system also needs to determine the delivery time, the number of order items and the staffing situation, and deploy the order and delivery staff at the specified time.
Walmart says it has had to drastically adjust its vehicle routing and capacity management systems for fast Delivery. This is because in the past, customers would place an order after selecting different items over several days and then pick up or deliver the goods. With the arrival of Express Delivery, some customer orders have become more fragmented and have shorter Delivery times. This requires more drivers and cars to be on standby.
The system can use real-time and historical data in milliseconds to get a prediction that is sufficient for the user to see the Express Delivery option at checkout.
Added pick up location function, delivery driver full service
Successful Express Delivery orders are routed to another fulfillment AI system, which organizes the order and selects and packages items in Walmart stores.
When an Express Delivery order comes into a particular store, the system will alert and assign the Delivery to trained staff. For regular orders, delivery drivers park in a designated space with a bright orange sign and wait for the order to arrive in their car. An Express Delivery order requires a driver to deliver the goods to his or her car.
To do this, the Express Delivery team had to add a new “pickup point” feature to the system, and they worked with Delivery partners to develop an application that navigates the driver to the correct location and provides distributed order fulfillment and readiness instructions.
Despite the extra steps involved, Walmart promises that Express Delivery will not affect the quality of service and that even cheap orders will be delivered in a timely manner.
Expand service scope and cooperate with autonomous driving companies
When asked if Walmart’s various automation efforts will boost Express Delivery, an official said, “It’s just that the number of Delivery partners the company works with will likely increase as the service expands.”
Self-driving-car startup Gatik is currently handling deliveries between some Walmart distribution centers and this week revealed the design of its next-generation van. Walmart has also partnered with Nuro to deliver groceries via self-driving cars in Houston, Texas, and struck deals with Ford and Postmates to make driverless deliveries in parts of Miami-Dade County, Florida.
Walmart representatives are positioning Express Delivery as another way to meet customers’ needs for quick travel by delivering goods to warehouses using an AI multi-channel fulfillment system that weighs millions of variables to assign different orders.
AI-driven services to limit the flow of people during the epidemic
Fiona Tan, senior vice president of Wal-Mart, said, “The platform and building architecture we built is the foundation and intelligence of Express Delivery. As we continue to add new machine learn-driven capabilities and the corresponding customer experience in the future, we will be able to leverage our flexible technology platform to rapidly iterate and expand.”
The move follows the launch of rival Amazon’s Prime Now delivery service, which appears to be overloaded with orders and has had to prioritize shipping household necessities, medical supplies and other “high demand” products, while other deliveries have been delayed. In April, Amazon’s grocery service and its Whole Foods division began implementing a system to send out weekly shopping offers to new customers, artificially limiting the number of online customers.
Wal-Mart announced that it would work with local health authorities to take aggressive steps to ensure the safety of employees and customers, hiring an undisclosed third-party cleaning company to disinfect and limiting the number of customers to five per 1,000 square feet in its stores.
It remains to be seen whether Wal-Mart will avoid the same fate that put pressure on retailers’ supply chains after Amazon warehouse workers diagnosed Novel Coronavirus pneumonia.
