Crowd Logistics

Delivery by private individuals

With Crowd Logistics, ordinary citizens – individually or collectively – organize the shipping of parcels through the course of their normal movements. A technological platform is generally used for this.

This new trend should not be ignored. The first pilot projects have already been set up abroad, by new organizations (e.g. Uber Rush – US, Instacart – US, Parcify – B) and established companies (e.g. My Ways from DHL, On My Way from Amazon).

Opportunities?

This project aims to demonstrate the opportunities to companies – rather than the threats – of crowd logistics by clearly revealing the economic and social impact based on feasible business models. This will be achieved through concrete calculations of return on investment, impact analyses and practical testing.

From insight to pilot projects

What is our planning?

1. To provide insights into the new trend emerging within the sector. Traditional businesses (DHL, Amazon), disruptive businesses (Uber), and new start-ups (Instacart)have already taken action in this development. Therefore, an examination of the market’s implementation will be provided.
2. To outline the legal framework, with particular attention to the aspect of product responsibility.
3. To define crowd-based applications and describe the underlying business models. Logistics companies, retailers and service providers are all launching new services based on crowd logistics, for both B2C and B2B. What do these various business models look like?
4. To calculate the economic feasibility (ROI) of the business models.
5. More extensive impact analysis on all stakeholders in the supply chain for B2C and B2B (smaller quantities). To this end, a multi-actor, multi-criteria analysis will be performed on the economically feasible business models.
6. Set up a pilot project for both B2C and B2B applications to validate the economic and social impact.