DX is a well-established provider of a wide range of delivery services to both business and residential addresses across the UK and Ireland. First established in 1975, DX now provides one of the widest ranges of overnight delivery services in the region, as well as logistics services.
The Challenge
DX instigated a tender with both business development and operational objectives:
Business Development
To introduce a tool to improve the contract bidding process. The solution needed to provide:
Flexibility to model different datasets from a diverse range of existing and potential clients
Data-driven information to determine the most appropriate solution
Reliability to provide accurate overheads and costings for the business to plan
Speed to produce quality results within short timeframes to aid winning more business
Operational Use
To implement the most appropriate route planning and optimisation software to bring daily efficiencies and cost savings across multiple contracts. The operational requirements were:
Significant cost savings
Accurate ETAs
Flexibility to use on many different types of contract
Usability for numerous teams of planners
The Solution
CACI won the tender and implemented its market leading route optimisation solution. Initially it was rolled out across multiple contracts, being used by different teams of planners, as well as in solution design to support and improve the business development and pricing function. DX have now been relying on CACI for over 10 years to grow their business and keep their staff and customers happy.
The Benefits
DX use CACI’s solution in business development to model client data for each tender, improving the process and increasing the company’s win rate. James Wood, Head of Solutions says:
On a daily basis it is absolutely key to us. This is about providing efficient data-driven solutions. Gut feel backed by data becomes irrefutable.
The route optimisation solution has introduced efficiency to operations through process improvement, as well as bringing huge savings by reducing costs.
Read the full case study here. For more information on how CACI can help you optimise your operation, get in touch and one of our data experts will happily arrange a time to talk.
When Agrovista, a leading supplier of agronomy advice, farming services and seed and crop protection products, wished to grow but faced unpredictable challenges when trying to do so, it became clear that data and technology would be crucial in supporting their growth ambitions. Agrovista delivers agronomic potential to their customers by helping them manage their operations more efficiently and profitably. To do this, they supply the following services:
As specialists from the business who visit farms to assess disease pressure, weeds, infestations and nutrient deficiencies to increase the yield.
As logistics and support teams that focus on the delivery of the solutions to any problems that arise in the specialists support stage, such as the provision of pesticides or nutrients.
The Challenge
Fulfilling all customers’ orders. Agrovista’s operations team wanted to further improve service levels and interactions with customers without losing that focus on core business functions.
Agrovista’s planning team was not familiar with route optimisation software. The business was also keen to avoid major changes for the team.
Agrovista needed to find a way to efficiently ship products out from their 20 depots across the country, which was particularly difficult in rural areas.
The Solution
Agrovista invested in CACI’s route optimisation software. This software was used to plan routes that met Agrovista’s business constraints, including a same-day delivery requirement. The implementation took advantage of the flexible integration options offered by the software, embedding it within Agrovista’s existing systems and automating the route creation process. This meant that compliant and efficient routes were pre-created for the planning team, all within software that they were familiar with.
The Benefits
The newly automated process for route optimisation helped Agrovista achieve several goals, including:
Planning efficient routes that adhered to all of Agrovista’s unique constraints. This allowed Agrovista to deliver all orders on time, keeping their customers happy and minimising costs.
Making software changes with minimal disruption to staff and the wider business.
Increasing the time-efficiency of the planning and operations teams.
Simplifying processes, allowing them to re-focus efforts on the core business.
As one of their top trusted suppliers, CACI’s reactivity and proactivity helped the business achieve their cost-reduction and route optimisation goals and will continue to support their rapid expansion strategically, effectively and at cost. Agrovista was impressed with CACI’s people, systems and processes, scoring CACI a 10/10 for their overall partnership experience. Going forward, Agrovista is actively looking to grow their relationship by adding other products and services from CACI’s logistics portfolio.
Read the full case study here. For more information on how CACI can help you optimise your operation, get in touch and one of our data experts will happily arrange a time to talk.
When it comes to purchasing geospatial data for organisations in the Logistics sector, ensuring that you and your business have asked the right questions to secure accurate data will be key to the success of your planning, efficiency and optimisation initiatives.Ournew blogseries will answer the critical questions you should ask yourselfwhen acquiring geospatial data for yourself or your organisation, from its coverage, accessibility and accuracy to legal sharing and usage.
What is the meaning of geographic coverage?
Geographic coverage is where the boundaries of the data extend to. For every piece of information that your business acquires, you must define the geographic coverage that you need it for.Without defining the boundary of the data, you could end up with far more data than you need. If you don’t define the geographic coverage, you may not receive all the data that you need.It’s important that you clearly define the geographic coverage for your data requirement.
What elements of geographic coverage through data should you consider before starting your project?
You should consider the geographic coverage that you need at the outset of your project and assess any future needs across multiple countries. Here are some example questions that may help you to ensure your geographic data requirements will be covered:
What is the difference between the United Kingdom and Great Britain?
If I buy data now for a specific country (e.g. The Netherlands), will it be available at the same detail in another country (e.g. Belgium)?
Will the maps and road networks line up across the borders?
Does the data cover the small islands around the edges of a country or small neighbouring countries such as Monaco?
Which countries offer detailed street level data in major towns and cities vs key roads in urban areas?
Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll dive into geospatial data analysis and the attribute information that comes with it.
Our team of experts can help you navigate the intricacies of every dataset in every country across the globe. Download our whitepaper ‘Key questions to ask when buying geospatial data’ to find out more.
For those watching what seems like a proliferation of Police dramas on television, you might be impressed by how easily data is shared between partner organisations: Officers tap into numerous IT systems to retrieve vital information that is key to solving their case.
Sadly, as you would probably expect, the reality is somewhat different.
Data sharing
The Digital Government report from July 2019 highlighted that data sharing is key to ensuring that digital Government can be transformative. It enables departments to work together to produce efficient public services that work for the citizen, thus improving the citizen-Government relationship.
The new National Data Strategy also recognises the importance data has to play in enhancing economic competitiveness and productivity across the UK economy, through new data enabled business models, and the adoption of data driven processes.
Data sharing has long been discussed within Policing. One of the key recommendations of the Bichard child protection inquiry in 2003 was that all forces across the UK should improve how they collect, store and share data.
In 2005 the Information Systems Strategy for the Police Service (ISS4PS) highlighted “The importance of a national approach to information sharing is now uppermost in current strategy for policing as reflected in the National Policing Plan.”
The following year the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) Guidance on the management of Police Information talked of effective Policing relying on the Police Service to communicate and share information with other forces and partner agencies.
Fast forward 15 years and the National Policing Digital Strategy 2020-30 prioritises the need to deepen collaboration with public sector agencies to unlock effectiveness, by developing ‘fluid’ data and insight exchange, within appropriate ethical and legal boundaries.
Collaboration is necessity
No-one can fail to notice the masses of data that is being created today and the fact that it is growing at an unprecedented rate.
Over the last 15 years, Policing has also started to see an explosion in the data that it holds. Allied to this is a growing pressure for them to start to utilise and share this data to their advantage.
Citizens are starting to demand and expect more from the Police service. With resources more stretched than ever, Police are now having to look at new ways of working – becoming smarter in utilizing the information they have available to them and sharing it to obtain greater insight.
No-one can accurately predict how the next 15 years will unfold, but as digital trends rapidly evolve across all areas of our lives, the abundance of data and the vast array of sources from which it emanates will continue to grow.
For a long time, public sector bodies have been locked into the mentality that they need to be autonomous in their operation, harbouring their own data and with the ideas of collaboration and sharing being forced rather than instinctive.
More recently though, policing as with all public sector, has seen austerity and the ever increasing need to save money as a driver towards more collaboration and data sharing.
A by-product of this is the ability to provide a better-quality service and a more rewarding citizen experience. Agencies are provided with a more holistic view of the individuals they are dealing with and their circumstances, allowing them to make better informed decisions.
Given this win, win scenario, it seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
Why’s taking too long?
If the idea of collaboration and sharing of data is clearly beneficial on a number of levels, why have we been discussing it for so long without taking any action?
The biggest obstacle to collaboration and data sharing is arguably a wealth of stand-alone, legacy applications that exist within Police estates.
“Legacy systems are invariably built on outdated architectures with high maintenance costs, inherent inflexibility, redundant features, lack of connectivity and low efficiency. Complex application and process logic is often hard-coded and undocumented.”
Gartner Oct. 2019
“Legacy systems are a significant barrier to effective Government transformation and digitisation.”
Digital Government report, July 2019
Given the autonomous mentality that previously existed, Police applications were never built with collaboration in mind.
This means that these legacy systems don’t easily provide the ability to interact and share their data with other applications – they are siloed, with the data being accessible only by the application to which it relates.
All is not lost however. There are numerous different approaches we can use to help create interoperability and integration for your legacy applications:
Rehost: redeploy the application component to other infrastructure (physical, virtual or cloud) without modifying its code, features or functions. This allows significant, short-term technology benefits without altering the application code base. Benefits of migrating to the cloud include: Improved application resilience; Disaster Recovery; Scalability; Accessibility.
Re-platform: migrate to a new runtime platform, making minimal changes to the code, but not the code structure, features or functions. This enables the application to run on modern technology framework while limiting the requirement for a major development project.
Refactor: restructure and optimize the existing code (although not its external behaviour) to enable data sharing and improve non-functional attributes. Refactoring focuses on breaking up the legacy code base into smaller manageable modules allowing consistent improvements to the application through small, iterative release cycles.
Re-architect: materially alter the code to shift it to a new application architecture and exploit new and better capabilities. This will leverage and extend the application features while introducing new integration concepts to promote data sharing and deduplication. Where appropriate an Application Programming Interface (API) would be developed to allow data sharing between application/modules over a secure HTTPS protocol.
Rebuild: redesign or rewrite the application component from scratch while preserving its scope and specifications. When deciding to rebuild an application, consideration should be taken to ensure the architecture is designed in a modular, scalable fashion promoting data sharing and future integrations using a combination of APIs and messaging architecture.
Replace: eliminate the former application component altogether and replace it, considering new requirements and needs at the same time.
To find out more about how we could help your organisation unlock integration and interoperability, take a look at our Police page.
When one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains needed to understand consumer shopping behaviours at a local level to enhance their relevance within existing and new stores, they quickly realised the impact that leveraging customer-centric data could have on achieving these goals.
CACI was selected as their partner to supply them with the consultancy and consumer behaviour data that they felt had been missing from their current data sources. The potential to gain a granular and cohesive perspective of customers with actionable insights to drive change was what encouraged the business to trust CACI to help reach their strategic objectives and better understand and cater to customers.
Challenge
While the business was equipped with some customer-oriented data to begin with, particularly comprehensive loyalty card data and competitor locations, they lacked the granular detail of industry datasets that CACI could supply. These datasets would bolster their understanding of customers beyond the organisation and would facilitate a new, optimal customer experience journey.
The external data about customer behaviour outside their organisation which they could access was generally based on small sample surveys and was not robust enough to support their enhanced customer understanding initiatives.
Other data sources were overly aggregated, challenging the business’ ability to determine what the result of a major market change in a market might be, such as a store closing or a new store opening, or a major local marketing campaign. This also made understanding how consumer behaviours changed as a result more difficult.
Solution
CACI’s data was game-changing for this business as it was based on actual spend data, and what consumers were actually doing versus what they were saying they were doing. The huge and granular sample size in comparison was also tremendously beneficial for the business, as it was available at brand level, ultimately unlocking major potential for them.
Results
CACI’s consultancy and data was able to significantly enhance the current capabilities of the team and allow them to add a significant new dimension to a number of different projects and use cases.
Potential partner analysis
The ‘race for space’ in the early to mid 2000s, combined with the emergence of multi-channel trading and stronger discounter competition, meant that many supermarket operators have been left with stores that are too big for their catchments and, therefore, were not as efficient or profitable as they once were. As a result, many supermarkets had to find ways to fill parts of their stores or car parks with partner retailers that would generate rental income, fill ‘baggy’ space, create a more comprehensive customer offers and help generate sales for the business by bringing in a different type of customer.
CACI’s data helped this business strategically plan for which partners to approach with a data-driven strategy to help those potential partners understand why a particular store or catchment would be suited to their brand.
Understanding competitor performance
Through CACI’s data, they could begin to understand and benchmark performance between their brand and others in a granular way for the first time, rather than using data based on a small sample survey (Kantar) or that aggregated to market rather than retailer (IGD).
Transactional Spend Data helped this business understand competitor performance in detail at local level by analysing trends in market share, transaction numbers and Average Transaction Values.
For example, before a new store opening, the performance of competing brands and what types of customers were shopping with them could be analysed in a way that has never been previously available. They could also understand what happened once the new store opened – which brands won and lost in the market and which types of customers changed their behaviour. This understanding was key to influencing future new store opening decisions that the team could into future forecasting estimates and set expectations accordingly through data-backed evidence.
Defining missed sales opportunities
CACI’s data helped this business understand where customers were cross-shopping with their competitors on the same day as shopping with them.
One example was by analysing customers driving out of the business’ store and past their petrol station but filling up their car at an alternative fuel station on the same day. The business lost trade because the customer drove past the front of the petrol station and chose to buy petrol elsewhere. While it did not necessarily answer ‘why’ a customer did not shop with the business, it did help generate questions and what to look out for in customers’ preferred shopping experiences so they could assess a particular store, determine which competitors were in the vicinity and what the business could do to compete– adjust the price, revisit the convenience of the store’s location and so on to drive improvements backed by data.
Another example was assessing the performance of one store in close proximity to a direct competitor’s smaller store. The business knew that they had been losing trade to this competitor for years, but they did not have the data to prove this loss.
CACI’s data was the solution— it quantified the number of shoppers visiting the business and its competitor on the same day and their respective transaction values.
This insight helped the business formulate strategies for marketing campaigns that would encourage shoppers to return to their store versus to their neighbouring competitor.
Format development
The business assessed quirks in catchments and emerging trends among competitors to conclude whether certain initiatives, such as creating a café space within a store, would be a success with their customers.
CACI’s data helped them define the demand for distinct types of café space initiatives by understanding the likely demand for the various types of Food-to-Go offers in the catchments of the stores.
Ultimately, it provided the business with a different approach to the café format and its offers for customers.
Customer profiles
For this business, customer loyalty cards were paramount to building customer profiles of their own customers. However, understanding the profile of competitors’ customers and how they were behaving was out of reach. This data helped the business understand the profiles of other brands’ customers and how similar or dissimilar they were to their own customers. Most importantly, they gained insight into what their spending patterns and behaviours were and how they changed over time.
To learn more about how CACI can help you leverage data to enhance your business operations, contact us today.
Nowadays, creating an optimal fulfilment service requires you to have access to sophisticated location intelligence data and superb knowledge of your customers. CACI’s Paul Dawsey and Dom Saunders, who work in the Logistics and Supply Chain business unit, presented the impact that location intelligence and customer insight have on optimising a distribution network and two examples of influential optimisation models at the Leaders in Logistics Summit on 28 March 2023.
Why are location intelligence & customer insight so important?
Having the right data for any type of location logistics solution is critical. Road network data, precise attributes and customer data are all critical parts of the distribution network optimisation process as they allow you to extrapolate the necessary details to ask the right questions and strategise accordingly.
There are several benefits that gaining these insights will have on your business’ operations, including:
Improving your understanding of and ability to inform store locations, and expand or contract store locations accordingly
Adhering to customers’ individual preferences for the delivery of products
Personalising fulfilment options and determining what works best for specific customer demographics
Enhancing the accuracy of your predictions for the length of time that drivers will need to spend at drop-off points, which will improve customer satisfaction and cut costs.
Example model 1: Network distribution modelling
To effectively model your distribution network, especially when making expensive decisions, your thought process should be backed by data. This will help you understand your customers in a way that will allow you to quantify and locate the demand that they have for your products, their consumption of your products, their collection preferences and more.
Once you have quantified and located demand, you can determine your baseline to strategically tweak the model you are building. Depending on what happens or changes in the marketplace and your sector in the coming years, and its impact on your model, you can formulate the right questions and conclude where changes need to be made.
Different customers will also present inevitably different logistics challenges. Profiling these customers will help you gauge how to better adhere to their existing and future demands. Pairing customer insight to understand demand with location intelligence to find the best locations to effectively reach your target customers will highly support the functionality of this model.
Finally, testing a range of ‘What if?’ scenarios depending on various changes your business may experience– population growth, market trends, what your market department is focusing on or how consumers will want to shop— will help you answer questions to gain strategic insights on your business’ efficiency, optimisation, costs, bottlenecks, products and services. This enables you to make recommendations for change.
When you take these answers and insights to the board for sign-off, you will have a significant amount of evidence through this model to back up your claims.
Example model 2: Delivery stop time modelling
Understanding the key factors that influence property level delivery stop times will ensure this model is created effectively. A grasp on the intricacies of property locations, households, context and vicinity and carrier data have become standard business practice for success in more recent years.
Effectively modelling property delivery stop times begins with accessing unique data feeds via customer and property intelligence data, road network and traffic data and carrier/historical customer data. These datasets can be then used in route optimisation tools such as CACI’s Pin Routes to fine-tune optimal routes, further increasing the level of optimisation. They show how dynamic the stop time analysis can be and how to consider running costs, regulations, and other impactful factors. They can also flag high traffic volume index, Acorn type, unloading duration and more to analyse existing stop times, compare delivery times, adapt strategies and conclude the optimal routes for drivers to take.
These data feeds support the development of your solution or model to produce an output of precise stop times based on customers’ addresses, enhance stop time generation and improve customer service and insights.
How can CACI help you optimise your fulfilment services?
Implementing a digital model that will showcase exactly what needs to change and improve will be paramount to running a successful, long-term distribution network. The right model based on the right data is what will help you build in the right way—gaining efficiencies, reducing costs and improving your customer service.
To find out how you can use location intelligence & customer insights to optimise your distribution network strategy, contact our team of experts.
McQueens Dairies is a third-generation family firm that provides doorstep milk delivery. Established in 1995, they started with a single milk round in St. Andrews, Scotland. Fast forward 28 years and they deliver to thousands of households throughout the UK.
Over the last six years, CACI and Ordnance Survey (OS) data have been helping them enhance their business, routing and milk delivery.
The challenge
House numbers are not always sequential, and in dense housing areas, you can’t always drive to the front of every house. The larger distances that must be travelled in rural areas in addition to the added number of minutes per delivery from where a driver can park to a property’s front door can become costly for the business. Moreover, while the average postcode contains 15 properties, some postcodes can contain up to 100. As a result, even having the correct address does not always eliminate ambiguity. With this in mind, McQueens Dairies got in contact with OS CACI partner in 2017 with the aim of optimising their routing and reducing that ambiguity to effectively reach customers on a broader scale.
The solution
To optimise their vehicle routing, McQueens Dairies have been using a bespoke solution from CACI called StreetServicer. Underpinned by OS AddressBase, StreetServicer is ideal for microlevel routing, such as meter-reading, milk deliveries or refuse collection. McQueens selected CACI’s StreetServicer as it proved to be the superior solution compared to what the other providers they spoke to could offer, and they recognised the tremendous efforts made by CACI to ensure the project would operate successfully.
Microlevel routing from StreetServicer also informs delivery drivers on what side of the road to walk on and when to cross the road. This provides the most optimised journey possible, whether they are in their milk float or they must park it to carry out the rest of the journey on foot. StreetServicer has been supporting McQueens by equipping their drivers with the most efficient delivery routing rounds down to the exact coordinate.
The benefits
Since adopting CACI and OS data, McQueens Dairies have reduced their fuel consumption by approximately 100,000 miles per year.
30 minutes per delivery shift have been saved thanks to routes being mapped out for drivers in microlevel detail.
A significant reduction in the burden on administrative staff has been experienced, as it would have taken two full-time staff to manually route all rounds every day.
Read the full case study here. For more information on how CACI can help you optimise your operation, get in touch and one of our data experts will happily arrange a time to talk.
Supply chains have faced massive disruptions due to unpredictable and massive global events like Brexit, Covid-19 and the ongoing war in Ukraine. The optimisation of distribution networks has been jeopardised during this “disruptive decade” as a result, reiterating the need for robust and flexible distribution network models to be implemented to help businesses thrive despite these trying times.
CACI’s Paul Dawsey and Louise Etherden, who work in the Logistics and Supply Chain and the Customer & Location Strategy areas of the business respectively, presented five necessary and innovative steps for businesses to take to build and maintain a world-class distribution network that will succeed in the “disruptive decade” at the Retail & Supply Chain Logistics conference on 1 March 2023.
What are the five recommended steps to create a world-class distribution network?
Optimising the end-to-end customer journey means developing an innate understanding of customers’ demands at every point of the supply chain. Once you understand demand, you can build an effective model based on intricate methodology to simulate your supply chain.
The five steps that will help you deliver high-quality, reliable and effective services to customers while maximising profit through a strategic distribution network are the following:
Step 1: Understand the consumer
In order to truly understand what matters, what you need to improve upon and what challenges need to be addressed, you must first focus on better understanding consumers.
Different consumers present different logistics challenges, so understanding the differences and why they present unique challenges will be integral. Paul and Louise suggest starting with generating customer profiles by channel, service and category to begin to better understand customers. Once you have gained this knowledge, obtaining additional contextual data into their lifestyle, shopping habits, location and property type, product preferences, and whether they shop with convenience or price in mind will help bring this visual to life.
Customer profiles are vastly different depending on the retailer, so utilising any available data on consumer spending data to gauge existing and future spending patterns will also be immensely helpful.
Step 2: Quantify and locate demand
Understanding where your current customers are located and how they interact with your products and services to accurately gauge your business’ share of opportunity is the next recommended step to take in building a future-proofed distribution network. Paul and Louise suggest asking yourself the following questions to better understand this:
Where is the demand now?
This can be assessed through an analysis of your current customers’ engagement with different product categories, ranges and services to understand where there are other potential customers, as well as your share of the opportunity. If you have stores, determining whether there is also an online halo and what it means for the demand and your share of demand by channel will be integral.
Where is the future demand?
What population growth patterns are arising? What does the current growth of online presence mean for my business in the future? How impactful are my business’ rapid delivery solutions, and where could there be demand for new solutions in the future? What is my business’ headroom and what are our target groups?
How do customers want to shop?
What is the role of online? How does my business have to deliver to certain customers? What needs to be offered and where? Where should we trial initiatives? Answering these questions will help you understand how your business must evolve.
Step 3: Build the baseline network model
The next critical step is to build a supply chain model that will help you get to the “as is” of where products hit your supply chain to understand where the customer is located versus where your product or service needs to get to.
The model should provide a detailed idea of how much it costs to transport products from one location to the next, capacity at store locations and required capabilities to store certain types of goods in certain ways. Designing an optimised network model with this criterion in mind will help you measure against the peaks and pitfalls of your existing model and determine where you must re-focus efforts, where the headroom for growth is, and so on.
Step 4: Develop strategies through a “what if” simulation
Next, you should ask yourself the following questions that apply your methodology and use data and tools to ensure you are developing an effective simulation. These questions include:
How can we maximise efficiency?
How much will it cost, and save?
Where are the bottlenecks?
How do we ensure it is robust?
Answering these questions will help you test a wide range of potential changes backed by strategic insights. You will be able to apply these answers to various test scenarios such as change demand, new products/services, sales increases through marketing, store network changes, capacity changes and more. Your insights will help you understand the impact of any proposed change and compare it to the baseline, if it is worth implementing. This approach to modelling will facilitate data-driven decisions which will instil confidence in all stakeholders.
Step 5: Keeping it live
To maintain the effectiveness of this approach, the baseline must be kept up to date. This includes ensuring a periodic refreshment of customer understanding and working actual network changes into the model.
If you lead with the customer in mind, you will find that you are able reduce costs while offering the services that will deliver sales and growth and remain robust. Ways of effectively leading with the customer include:
Tailoring your solutions and strategies to the market and your business partners
Focusing trials and investments where there is greatest opportunity
Optimising your toolkit to support logistics operations
Dynamic planning for future demand, services and growth
Communicating with your customers about deliveries.
Get in touch with our team of experts to find out how to optimise your distribution network.
For the uninitiated reading this, what is the cloud?
Well in its simplest form, the cloud refers to a remote Data Centre, commonly owned and operated by a 3rd party, that is used to host applications and store data that a Force would have previously provided via their own on-premise Data Centre facility.
The cloud is commonly accessed via the internet, meaning any device that has some form of internet connection can access the applications and data that reside there. That device could be a desktop in the station, but it could just as easily be a remote device such as a laptop, mobile or tablet being used out in the field. Given access is via the internet it also means that it makes it far easier to share anything that’s stored in the cloud with other entities should you wish to do so. Ideal if you want to work collaboratively with other agencies and share data.
Another added benefit is that the cloud hosting provider takes on the responsibility for maintaining the infrastructure on which your data and applications are stored, as well as being responsible for the environment in which it resides.
Cloud services are typically subscription based, which shifts the commercial model from a capital one, where the Force has a large capital outlay relating to procuring and maintaining their own in-house IT provision, to a revenue-based, ‘pay as you go’ model allowing for easier budgeting with no large initial outlay. Cloud technology also provides the ability to ramp services up and down as needed, meaning the Force only pays for what it needs, typically with a lower overall total cost of ownership.
CLOUD FIRST POLICY
Back in 2013 the Government introduced its “Cloud First” policy. Within it was a recommendation to all Public sector organisations that, they should prioritise the use of cloud when considering new IT solutions. The inference being the public cloud rather than a community, hybrid or private deployment model.
Key to this recommendation was that “Departments should always source a cloud provider that fits their needs, rather than selecting a provider based on recommendation.” I’ll come back to this point later.
The Government stated that, “By exploiting innovations in cloud computing we will transform the public sector ICT estate into one that is agile, cost-effective and environmentally sustainable.”
The benefits of having a cloud-based deployment were clearly evidenced in 2017 following the Manchester terrorist bombing. In the aftermath of the incident, the cloud based HOLMES2 (Home Office Large Major Enquiry System) was used to set up a Casualty Bureau, to support with missing persons, the identification of individuals and logging of evidence. Thanks to being hosted in the cloud, within two hours of the attack, 27 forces were able to utilise the casualty bureau to support one another with mutual aid.
Another cloud native system that will undoubtedly benefit all forces is the much criticised and highly controversial LEDS (Law Enforcement Data Service). LEDS is the Home Office’s new “super-database” for Police. It combines the PNC (Police National Computer) and the PND (Police National Database) into one data source. Although massively over budget and behind schedule, no one doubts the benefits it will bring to Policing. Given the amalgamation of the systems there will be reductions in running costs by supporting a single, far more efficient system. Police will have access to a much broader set of information, which should help in speeding up the identification of persons of interest. LEDS is to be hosted on the commodity cloud service within Amazon Web Services (AWS). This will widen the scope beyond policing in terms of organisations able to obtain access, such as the DVLA, Financial Conduct Authority, Highways England, Competition and Markets Authority and the Royal Mail.
Arguably, the cloud-based technology that has had the biggest positive impact of late is Microsoft’s 365 Productivity Services suite, being rolled out to Forces as part of the National Enablement Programme. The national lockdown that was imposed in response to trying to combat the Covid 19 pandemic, added an additional level of complexity to Policing. Whilst most things ground to a halt, criminal activity continued and so did the need to police it. By using the collaboration tools that are offered as part of the productivity suite, Forces were able to continue to operate using a virtual environment, allowing employees to come together whatever and wherever their location.
Given the exhortations of the Government and the evidential benefits of adopting cloud technology, does that mean all Forces have rushed to go ‘all-in’ pushing all their Applications and data into the cloud in haste?
The short answer is no. Despite the numerous benefits to adopting a cloud first approach, as recently as 2 years ago, reports suggested that as many as 75% of all Forces still accessed and managed their data and applications on premise. So, the big question is why?
BARRIERS TO ADOPTION: SECURITY CONCERNS
Understandably, Police by the very nature of the job they do are quite anxious when it comes to re-housing their applications and data. A good percentage of the work is sensitive and needs guaranteed security. As you would imagine, most forces were initially very sceptical that the cloud could offer the same level of security as that provided in their own on-premise data centres. Surely no-one would be as concerned about the security of Police IT than the Police themselves.
When we talk about security in this instance, it usually relates to the need to ensure that everything belonging to the force is protected from a potential data security breach. When you have been responsible for security for so long it is hard to share that responsibility with someone else and have the confidence that they will look after things as well as you do. It is also unnerving when your security is no longer fully reliant on the tangible devices sitting in your data centre, that you can see and touch with a reassurance that everything is ticking along as it should be.
In a traditional on-premise solution, IT teams must manage and maintain security at every single location and for every single application. When it comes to Public Cloud, providers don’t have visibility of where or what the ultimate endpoint is, therefore all security has to be centralised and unified, able to cater for all possibilities. This unified security approach means you may end up with access to more security than you currently have employed on premise.
Let’s just for a moment take a look at cloud security:
Security is now a shared responsibility with the cloud vendor, meaning there is less of a burden on your IT teams and your finances.
Updates and patches no longer have to be resourced and scheduled in by the IT team, instead being applied in a timely fashion.
Cloud security is highly automated, meaning a reduced need for human intervention and less opportunity for errors.
As security is centralised there are less boundaries in relation to possible end points.
Cloud security may offer more specialised and robust options that would probably otherwise be unavailable due to cost.
Although public cloud involves trust of a 3rd party. They are generally experts in their field and are focussed purely on security and nothing else.
Cloud providers are now compliant with necessary regulation, meaning you can rest assured they are using best practices.
Over the last few years billions of pounds have been invested by Public cloud vendors to provide efficient data security. So much so, that cloud security arguably provides better protection than that offered by a lot of on-premise facilities. Most of the major vendors are compliant with the Home Office’s National Police Information Risk Management Team (NPIRT) requirements, meaning cloud services can now support Police Forces across the UK who require Police-Assured Secure Facilities (PASF) to process and store their data in the cloud.
A big indicator of shifting attitudes around security, is the recent decision by the Defence Digital Service (DDS), a new group in the Ministry of Defence (MOD), to shift its data for its Readiness Reporting and Deployability Discovery (R2-D2) project to a public cloud.
Phil Jones from ISS (MOD’s Information Systems & Services) stated that Public Cloud is being used by several operations and projects within the MOD to identify how new services and capabilities can be delivered to Defence. Teams are able to access accounts to the Public Cloud offerings provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure – this provides teams with freedom to evolve their own Services that take advantage of industry leading capabilities.
BARRIERS TO ADOPTION: CULTURE
Culture was cited as being another barrier to adoption. Historically, Forces have been quite parochial in their nature. Very much with a sense of, “This is how we’ve always done things!” or “We’ll wait and watch what everyone else does first before we decide.” This mentality has left forces lagging behind the criminals who they are trying to outwit (Who conversely, have exploited this new technology in advanced and innovative ways, making their criminal activities far more complex and difficult to untangle).
However, police culture is changing thanks to the everyday use of cloud in our personal lives. Barely a day goes by where we don’t perform some kind of interaction with cloud-based technology, passing data back and forth between applications and allowing us to do things on the move using our mobile devices, such as ordering food, making appointments and booking holidays, remember them?! We even trust the cloud to store our most precious memories in the form of photos and videos.
So, if security concerns have now been addressed and cultural views are changing, then what else is slowing mass adoption?
For those of you that read my last blog, you’ll already know the answer. However, for those that didn’t, go and read it! But in the meantime, the answer relates to the fact that a lot of forces maintain a large number of legacy applications, that were never designed for the cloud and don’t easily present themselves to being migrated on to one.
However, the aforementioned blog provides an indication as to how we at CACI can help forces overcome this obstacle.
WHICH CLOUD IS BEST?
If all barriers have been overcome and the decision has been made to adopt the cloud, how do you then go about deciding which cloud is best for you?
Let me try and explain by use of an analogy; when your child reaches a certain age there comes the time you want them to spread their wings and leave the family nest. Do you quickly find the first available cheap premise you can and proceed to move your loved one into it as quickly as possible? Then as each successive child reaches that same stage, find a similar property to the first and do the same again? Maybe you do!
But in all seriousness, most of us would probably seek the services of some form of an Estate or Letting Agent, someone with full knowledge of what’s available in the market that best suits your little treasure’s wants and needs. Relying on the Agent to advise and suggest viable options, before carefully choosing the best property available to them.
Well a similar approach should be applied when adopting a cloud strategy. Do you find the first cheap, hosted environment available and proceed to throw all your applications and data into it? Again, maybe you do, and I know some have to their regret. But the smart option is to seek the services of an experienced, qualified cloud migration partner, someone who has thorough knowledge of the market and an ability to provide the best advice on the optimum solution for your organisation. A partner that will consider your differing workloads and what you need to achieve and design a strategy around a perfect hybrid of available cloud resource.
HERE, NOW AND THE FUTURE
So with the many benefits the cloud brings: accessibility, affordability, removal of a maintenance burden, better levels of security, increased speed of deployment and rapid scalability, as well as the Government pushing its ‘Cloud First’ strategy, is this the end for on-premise data centres?
Gartner predicts that by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have shut down their traditional data centres, versus 10% today. But, is it as clear cut as that?
Traditionally when new applications were requested by the force, IT departments would consider how they could deploy the application using their in-house architecture. This strategy has worked well for many years, whereby the goal was to deliver the application to the Force’s own end users. But as the workforce has now become more agile and the need for collaboration with other agencies grows, it drives the need to change the strategy and ask, ‘how can we deploy this so that we can easily access it from anywhere and share the information stored with others if we need to?’. Decisions now need to be less architecture driven and more about the needs for the services that are being delivered.
Cloud doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition – don’t let the one size fits all message fool you. Just because someone recommends a particular cloud service it doesn’t necessarily mean it is suitable for your particular workload. Every Public cloud doesn’t fit every IT function. Planning around objectives and consideration of things like low latency and high bandwidth traffic needs to take place when designing a cloud migration strategy. Hence the need for an experienced, qualified partner who will provide a comprehensive, overall assessment before further engaging with your team on creation of a mobilisation and migration plan.
Cloud computing is no longer the novel concept it once was, it is a well-established, proven mainstream technology with many benefits and as operating models shift and demands increase, Policing should recognise cloud as a more effective method of delivering applications, software and data to those that need it.
It’s now highly regarded as inevitable that in time Gartner’s prediction will come to pass, but whether it is optimistic to think that it will occur within the next 4 years remains to be seen.
Returns are a crucial aspect of consumer e-commerce. Shoppers want to be able to return easily and quickly, but for logistics and supply chain operators, the costs of doing so can mount quickly. It’s not always clear what the total cost of the return is, either to the business or within the supply chain.
Delivering a positive customer experience is paramount to retailers. Retailers nowadays understand that no matter who delivers an order to a customer’s door, the customer associates the delivery service with the brand they’ve purchased from. Therefore, whether you’re a third party logistics specialist, offering a white label service or operating logistics for your own retail organisation or brand, you must provide delivery and returns service levels that customers are promised by the originating organisation.
Organisations can’t afford to offer effortless returns at any cost. As a relatively late addition to the doorstep delivery proposition, returns are tricky to build into your business model. Customer return behaviour is unpredictable, and retailers may encourage over-purchasing with the expectation of a high volume of returns. The clothing sector is a primary example of this, where it can become difficult for logistics businesses to operate efficient end-to-end returns processes that are also profitable, and that satisfy customer and consumer needs.
Despite the challenges, there is a way to understand and refine your return logistics and processing, even in fast-changing markets. With the right data and tools to hand, you can:
Use customer segmentation and historic transactional data to understand customers’ propensity to return.
Build a predictive demand model that demonstrates where different customer types are in your delivery area.
Develop return strategies at property level, including local partner store returns and PUDO (pick-up and drop-off).
Build into your delivery planning to optimise routing and scheduling to include return pickups
This approach gives you a dynamic approach to returns, so you can adapt it as consumer behaviour and demand changes.
You can transparently show how return costs are made up and use this to support decisions in your business, and you can manage consumer expectations clearly while dealing with outliers in the most appropriate way for your business and network.
Not all logistics businesses are capable of achieving this because it demands an specific blend of customer insight and routing intelligence. CACI have the expertise to help you gain the necessary competitive advantage to dominate the return logistics space.
CACI can supply you with the data and tools or provide full project support including consultancy and strategic, data-oriented recommendations so that you can be confident your delivery and returns proposition will work for all stakeholders. With insight like this, you can focus on your core strength: managing and delivering an excellent logistics operation. Contact us to learn more at iwheeldon@caci.co.uk
Check out the other blogs in the Last mile short cuts series:
