Active Ants uses data tools from Tracey

After a year, the cooperation between Active Ants and Tracey has led to better information provision to Active Ants customers and insight into the performance of the deployed parcel carriers.

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Growing need for control and insight into parcel shipments

‍The enormous growth in the number of parcels sent and the increasing demands of customers to be proactively informed has meant that companies want to keep an overview and control over the shipments sent out. This is also the case with Active Ants, where the need for direct insight into irregularities during the delivery of packages has led to the collaboration with Tracey.

At the moment, problems with the various parcel carriers are detected within thirty minutes and sent back to the Active Ants system by Tracey. With this, the webshop customers of Active Ants can then get to work to proactively keep the final recipient informed and to automate the customer service processes.

Make or buy decision

“In mid-2021, our customers' call for more insight into the performance of the carriers we use became increasingly clear and louder,” says Roeland Lengers, IT Director at Active Ants. “Of course we like to respond to the wishes of our customers and of course we prefer to do this with our own IT department. At the same time, tracking shipments is essentially a non-company activity for Active Ants; our core activity is sending packages as quickly as possible. We soon realized that uniform tracking of the status of a shipment could work as a black box for us, a box that we just had to talk to in the right way. The choice fell on Tracey at the time because it was a young, innovative club where we could express our wishes. I'm bold enough to say that Tracey also learned a thing or two from Active Ants during that time. In symbiosis with Tracey, we were able to connect the mutual systems quickly and adequately. Active Ants uses Tracey's system as a black box in two ways: firstly, we receive the most important status transitions and exceptions per shipment without having to poll carriers, secondly, the KPI screens within Maya are built on the basis of WebComponents. The load for generating these screens can be very high, something we like to happen on Tracey's systems, not Active Ants'. In my view, this is a successful example of the right make-or-buy decision.”

Improving the delivery experience before shipping

‍Tracey provides “plug-and-play” business intelligence visuals to evaluate carrier performance. Because data from each carrier has been converted to a standard format, the carriers can easily be compared with each other on the basis of these reports.

These data-driven reports enable web shops to make well-founded choices for the correct deployment of parcel carriers in different countries. For example, an objective choice can be made for the highest delivery speed or for fewer irregularities. This allows a webshop to choose the carrier that scores well on the points that are important to its customers; this ultimately leads to higher conversion. This makes expensive, separate business intelligence solutions for the analysis of parcel carriers unnecessary.

Use of artificial intelligence

‍Both parties also see various possibilities for strengthening each other in the future: for example, the shipping data from Active Ants offers a good basis for Tracey to make predictions about the timely and correct delivery of packages. “These models are currently being trained, but are already showing results with an accuracy of 89% or higher,” says Sander Hak, Product Manager and co-founder at Tracey. “This means that we already predict delays with a high degree of certainty and can provide feedback more than ten hours earlier than the carrier itself.”

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Use and value of shipping data for Active Ants customers

Jean Lahaye, co-founder of Active Ants says: “We pass on the data we receive from Tracey to our customers, enabling them to derive value from it. We already see that our customers anticipate this and adjust their work processes in order to subsequently inform their own customers better and proactively. This ensures that, as Active Ants, we offer just that little bit of extra service to support our customers in their e-commerce activities.

About Active Ants

‍Active Ants was founded in 2010 with the idea of making e-fulfillment more accurate and efficient through innovation and automation, and we succeeded! Active Ants has now grown into one of the larger fulfillment players in the Netherlands with more than 250 customers and more than 3 million orders per year. In 2018, Active Ants entered into a partnership with bpost, which has since held a majority interest in Active Ants. This collaboration has led to the roll-out of new warehouses in Roosendaal, Willebroek (B) and Dorsten (D). The opening of the UK branch is planned for September 2022.

About Tracey

Tracey is a Dutch data company founded in 2019 to help parcel shippers get more value from their shipping data. The company has developed its own unique Parcel Engine that can be easily linked to ERP, WMS, DMS and webshop systems to read, process and analyze shipping data from carriers. These AI-driven analytics include carrier performance monitoring and benchmarking, near-real-time monitoring, and notifications and predictions of irregularities during parcel delivery.

All Tracey's products help to provide an optimal delivery experience through carrier selection, customer service automation, shipment monitoring and forecasting delays and irregularities.

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