Once a customer has made a purchase on an ecommerce site, the shipment needs to be delivered. Generally, there are two steps involved in this process:
The transfer of the product from the warehouse storing the product to the warehouse that is nearest to the customer
The transfer of the product from the warehouse to the customer
Let’s learn more about the problems faced in these transits and the ways in which analytics can help in this regard.
So how do you find out these optimal clusters? Do you remember the goal that we had considered in clustering? It was to maximise the inter-cluster distance and minimise the intra-cluster distance. Now, if you also add an extra cost to be optimised - the number of shipments delivered per unit distance travelled, you may get these new clusters. This can be done through optimising techniques, which is beyond the scope of this course.
Additional Reading:
You can read a couple of articles on how data analytics has created an impact on the shipping and logistics industry.