The Challenge

The challenge we seek to address after a successful pilot is to scale up Unattended Delivery & Collection as an integral part of the food- & non-food retail as well as Direct to Consumer (D2C) supply chains. We have noted that to successfully scale up, easy almost plug-and-play onboarding and particularly the secure owner-controlled data access to back-office systems of shippers and Logistic Services Providers (LSPs), are critical success factors we seek to address. Doing so will also facilitate the valorization of digital components of products and services by the data owner. At TCNS, we have successfully completed a pilot with a local retailer for unattended deliveries to the end customer. The pilot confirmed the value added of this service for shippers, LSP, and end customers alike.

The Solution

With FIWARE and iSHARE building blocks in this project, we develop a universal method for unattended delivery & collection handling, with the use of smart models, data communication using NGSI LD standards, and adhering to Data Sovereignty principles. We expect this to result in a generic and scalable process of trusted data sharing whereby the shipper and the LSP can benefit from seamless integration with their systems for unattended delivery & collection to their end customers, addressing the customer preference for unattended delivery & return collection at their homes or business thereby offering more services related to data owner-controlled access to digital component (process and product) from (primary) production to consumption in (food) retail (B2B and B2C) and D2C channels.

Business Projections – Scalability

A 2022 Klarna survey amongst 14000 consumers in 13 European countries showed that online shopping is increasingly surpassing offline shopping. In the UK and Sweden, online is already more popular than offline. For the Netherlands, it is almost equal with 30 percent preferring online and 31 percent offline. For consumers from generation Z online shopping is self-evident.

From interviews with 57 experts from the worlds of food retail, trade, start-ups, and consultancy about the future of online food trade in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Great Britain, and Turkey, a study of Strategy&, part of the PwC Network, shows that the market share of online within supermarket sales will at least double in the coming years. In the most aggressive scenario, the share of online could rise to 25 percent of the market by 2030.

Unattended Delivery & Collection as-a-service resolves the critical problem in the Last Mile of being unable to deliver/collect or having to wait at home for a delivery/collection. The implementation of I4Trust technology will help to make Unattended Delivery & Collection as-a-service scalable so that many shippers and LSPs can use it.