ANLY482 AY2017-18T2 Group 11 EDA

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EDA		Analysis & Insights

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) – Overview

Overview

Being relatively new in the last mile delivery sector, it is important for Company ABC to maintain an ideal level of efficiency while keeping cost low to ensure profitability. Thus, in order to keep cost low, Company ABC decided to approach the 2 types of service deliveries differently. The Standard Service delivery would be outsourced to Contracted drivers while the Express Service deliveries would primarily fall on the In-House delivery couriers. Thus, in order to derive an accurate depiction of these 2 driver types, the later parts of the EDA section will analyse these 2 driver types separately. This analysis will be done on both temporal and spatial scale. However, prior to that, the upcoming section will first aim to provide an overview of the deliveries conducted by ABC.

Being relatively new in the last mile delivery sector, it is important for Company ABC to maintain an ideal level of efficiency while keeping cost low to ensure profitability. Thus, in order to keep cost low, Company ABC decided to approach the 2 types of service deliveries differently. The Standard Service delivery would be outsourced to Contracted drivers while the Express Service deliveries would primarily fall on the In-House delivery couriers. Thus, in order to derive an accurate depiction of these 2 driver types, the later parts of the EDA section will analyse these 2 driver types separately. This analysis will be done on both temporal and spatial scale. However, prior to that, the upcoming section will first aim to provide an overview of the deliveries conducted by ABC.

Figure 5 shows the summary statistics for both Contractor drivers and In-House drivers based on the quantity for each type of driver, service type and size of parcel. From the data-table, the team identified that majority of the parcels are small in size and are served by contractor drivers under service type “Z”.

However, this concentration of parcel size within the “Small” category is not an unexpected phenomenon as Figure 6 indicated that 85.74% of the total parcels delivered are “Small” in size. This could be the reason why contracted drivers are primarily delivering “Small”-sized parcels.

In addition, as shown in Figure 7, 99.54% of all deliveries are conducted by Contracted drivers. In comparison, only 0.46% of all deliveries are conducted by In-House drivers. As such, this indicates that the services conducted for Contracted drivers are highly sought after, which justifies the large number of deliveries shown in Figure 4.

EDA - Spatial Distribution

Spital Distribution

Location - Contractor Drivers

The deliveries conducted by the Contracted drivers were analysed on a spatial scale. The hierarchy starting from parcel distribution by Zone Code (comprising of West and Central) was then further sub-divided and analysed in terms of District Code, Postal Zone and lastly, Postal Code. Based on the tree-maps generated above, Figure 8 to 10 indicates that the highest volume for the Contracted drivers falls on Western Region, District Code 22 and Postal Zone 64. On the other hand, Postal Zone 62 have the lowest volume within District Code 22.

In addition, as District Code 22 had the highest number of deliveries, the team expected one of the Postal Code within this district to be the one experiencing the highest number of delivery. However, Figure 11 indicated that the individual Postal Code that faced the highest number of delivery falls on Postal Code 228241 and this is a Postal Code within District Code 9; Which is a far cry from the team’s expected zone. As such, the team will analyse this Postal Code and its Zone in greater depth.

Based on the analysis of Postal Zone 22 (Figure 12), the team identified several hotspots/ Postal Codes in which deliveries can be as high as 626 during the period of January to November 2017. Based on the observation, Postal Code 228241 represents one of those location facing higher parcel deliveries. Hence, the deliveries in 2017 for this Postal Code is analysed.

Based on Figure 13, the team observed that there are many days in which the number of records is above “1”. This means that there are multiple delivery orders to the same location in a particular day. This seems rather counter-intuitive to the team as it hints that the driver visits the same location multiple times to accomplish the parcel deliveries. As such, the team investigated this phenomenon and understands that it is possible to have multiple deliveries to the same building within a single trip. For example, the driver can accomplish 2 deliveries within the same building that are at 2 different levels.

Besides using quantity as the variable within the tree-map, the team also explored using “Size” as an added dimension to the tree-map and the results are as follows.

After using size as a dimension, Postal Zone 22 is still one of the more interesting zones as it faces a relatively small parcel volume yet have a concentration that is comparable to other Postal Zones. As shown above, the concentration of parcels within Postal Zone 22 seems to be in Zip Code 228241 where majority of the parcels that it delivers are Medium sized parcels. This is unlike many other areas where, typically, the number of Small parcels would be the primary parcel size that drivers delivers. As such, the team delved further into this Zip Code.

Based on Figure 15, the team observed that there are several unique characteristics of this Zip Code. Firstly, the Small parcels face lesser variations, unlike the other zones. Secondly, its Medium sized parcels seem to face a higher variation as compared to the other sizes. Lastly, the demand for parcel deliveries of Medium and Large-sized Parcels only began from May. As a result of the variations seen in Medium parcels, this has formed the main reasons for the fluctuations of parcels seen in Figure 13.

Location - Contractor Drivers

Insights