Overview
An American privately-held supermarket chain with more than 350 stores throughout the U.S. state of Texas, as well as in northeast. It is ranked amongst the best retailers in the USA, generating multi-billion $ in revenue and is listed in Forbes magazine.
The Mandate
Build a last mile delivery solution that enables the retailer to on-board and manage a pool of crowd-sourced drivers for same-day home deliveries to customers.
The Solution
Built a bespoke enterprise grade application with the following subsystems: driver on-boarding, order management, driver shift schedule, driver payroll, driver messaging & order logistics.
Key Highlights
Challenge
Driver Scheduling
As the system grew, it had up to 4,000 drivers accessing it trying to pick up shifts within a period of 15 minutes. This led to huge spike in load on the server and degradation of user experience.
Solution: Overcame the challenge by further isolating the micro-services onto separate instances. Further, a load balancer was configured to ease up the traffic spikes.
Feature
Free Range Drivers
The client wanted to enable a driver to pick up and drop off orders from outside their scheduled zone. This would help drivers serve more customers and eventually enable them earn more tips.
Solution: Refined the system to allow drivers to pick up orders from outside their respective zone as long as they clocked into their zone at the beginning of their shift.
Feature
Early Schedule Access
The client wanted to reward drivers who were performing well within certain metrics by giving them early access to the weekly schedule.
Solution: Built a feature which kept track of all performance metrics over a certain time period and set their access to the weekly schedule. After this was implemented, the number of drivers accessing the system at the same time reduced thereby improving overall user experience.
Challenge
Payroll processing
Payroll for the drivers was processed manually on a daily and weekly basis. The weekly payroll calculations were complex and time consuming to process as they were being done manually via excel.
Solution: Captured the entire offline manual process and built an easier, automated online payroll process.
Results
Business growth over a period of 1 year
Hours saved each week processing payroll
Increase in the number of stores served across Texas over a period of 1 year
