How Boxbot Is Shaping the Future of Automated Delivery?

In the times where everything has become one-touch away with mobile apps, service providers must facilitate customers with best service and delivery experiences. It is high time that vendors should enhance their last-mile delivery services with efficiency. The movements of goods from the transportation hub to the final destination, specifically personal residence in most of the cases, is termed as last-mile delivery. The last mile logistics are currently focusing on delivering items to end user as fast as possible.

Boxbot is one such last-mile logistics startup which has recently come out of stealth mode and announced its plans to roll out an end-to-end automated last-mile delivery system. The plan includes placing automated local fulfilment hubs near residential neighbourhoods that could reduce the cost and accelerate the speed of last-mile delivery.

Austin Oehlerking, Boxbot's co-founder and CEO stated,  "Boxbot is a new type of delivery company, focused completely on last-mile delivery. By leveraging advanced technology, we can deliver a higher number of packages in less time and at a substantially lower cost per package. We're excited to unlock this potential with Boxbot."

These hubs will automatically sort packages and load onto Boxbot's vehicles. These vehicles would have autonomous driving technology with the goal to increase efficiency in last-mile delivery.

Mark Godwin, Boxbot's co-founder, and CTO said, "Automation is transforming virtually every aspect of the way packages are shipped and delivered to the end customer. But the final step, when packages move from the hub to consumers' doorsteps, is still an entirely manual process. With Boxbot, automation is coming —finally— to the last mile."

According to McKinsey report, the estimated last-mile delivery costs sum up to more than US$86 billion a year. The logistics company believes that it would be like to implement automation to reduce the cost of package deliveries and eliminate post-online-shopping headaches including missed deliveries, damaged shipments, stolen packages, and painful returns.

Much like this, the concept of micro-fulfilment is on the edge to transform product delivery systems. Micro-fulfilment included setting up of urban robotic warehouses with a similar goal of reducing cost and increase efficiency of the last-mile delivery system.

It would be interesting if companies like Boxbot could recognize and combine the essentials of both concepts to develop seamless operations. The combination will be an exemplary model of how different trends across logistics, e-commerce, warehousing, and retail can collaborate and redefine the future.