Valeria Tennina and Wirakan Inthanu’s Master thesis project “Last Mile Logistics in Small Cities”, supervised by Joachim Arts and Francesco Viti and sponsored by Urbeee, a logistics start-up based in Berlin took home the award for “Best Project Presentation’ at the 2021 MIT SCALE Supply Chain research expo.
This is an inaugural Master thesis project for Urbeee with the LCL. The pair is tackling the key research question: what type of logistics concepts for sustainable food delivery service are appropriate for different scales and topographies of cities, especially smaller cities?
Urbeee GmbH is a dynamic logistics start-up based in Berlin. Through their software and data-driven approach, they already secured one of the top 3 food retailers in Germany as a long-term customer in the food delivery market in Berlin. Urbeee now faces the challenge of expanding its delivery business and so is looking for a concept that is explicitly tailored to small- and medium-sized cities (100,00 – 500,000 population). While it is worth setting up central warehouses for delivery in large cities, delivery in small towns has to be organised directly from the store. In addition, logistics concepts such as Milkrun or dynamic route planning need to be used.
This project involves creating a store-based logistics concept that can be sustainably operated on a small scale (<= 10.000 orders per month). LSCM students Valeria Tennina and Wirakan Inthanu are evaluating different logistics concepts on a specific city to understand financial viability of various concepts for a city.