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When data delivers
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When data delivers
Number-crunching big data sets reveals commercial insights that can continually improve a business. And leading the way is the online retailer Ocado WHEN Shiv Kaushal clicks a mouse button, pinpricks of light begin to glow on a video wall. Soon, fine, brightly-coloured lines emanate from those points and, as they spread across the screen, they split and branch out, looking for all the world like brain cells sprouting synapses. But this is no neural network infographic: it’s a real-time plot of an online delivery business, its vehicles percolating across Britain from dawn til dusk and beyond. What fuels this powerful visualisation? Big data. Kaushal is software development manager at UK-based Ocado, one of the most technologically advanced online retailers in the world. He’s able to watch the company’s thousands of Mercedes delivery vans plying the streets in real time because they beam huge volumes of operational data into cloud servers, where algorithms mine it for insights that can improve the business. Kaushal’s powerful mapping application on the video wall is just one result of that effort. The same data lets managers zoom in to find out if a van is running early or late. “The mapping application lets us see how this might have a knock-on effect so we can give customers updated grocery delivery times,” Kaushal says. Being responsive through technology is vital to Ocado; for its main business of online grocery delivery but also for the generalpurpose online retail platforms Ocado has built for other businesses. For instance, UK supermarket Morrisons relies on Ocado to manage its entire online grocery business. And Ocado has used its expertise in the grocery market to spin out an online pet supplies retailer, Fetch, a kitchenware vendor, Sizzle, and a beauty store in collaboration with Marie Claire called Fabled.
Ocado believes that the best way to stay ahead of the competition is to be at the leading edge of cloud-based technology. And that needs feeding with data - lots of it. Ocado then uses that data to make smart predictions and recommendations which help its customers make more informed buying decisions. All this is powered by complex machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms developed by an inhouse data science team. Ocado also uses big data and cloud technologies to solve its own version of one of computer science’s toughest challenges the travelling salesman problem. The problem is this: given a list of locations, find the shortest route that visits them all once before returning to base. It is tough because the number of permutations quickly becomes mind-boggling as the number of cities grows. In Ocado’s case, that problem translates to: given an average of 5-20 addresses to visit with groceries - the typical van’s capacity what is the best route for thousands of vans? “Every van route is an instance of the travelling salesman problem. We have to use our data and some clever algorithms to find the optimal solution because you cannot check all the permutations by brute force,” says Evan Innis, manager of Ocado’s data science group. Once that optimal route is calculated, it can be further complicated by parking problems, traffic congestion and tower blocks with outof-order lifts. Feeding the data into the route calculation to allow for those confounding factors is one of his group’s tasks. How do they do that? One way is by fitting the vans with a wide range of sensors, says Matthew Leigh, Ocado’s fleet technical specialist. Each van includes a rugged tablet
The data from Ocado’s vans allows a real-time visualisation of the company’s deliveries across the country
PC that serves as a general purpose customer information terminal and satnav. Above that is a windscreen-mounted dashcam with one lens trained on the road ahead and another on the driver to record significant events that may occur. Below the dash is a wireless GPS unit that uses a cellphone or Wi-Fi signal to beam data to the cloud, including temperature, wheel speed, GPS, engine revs, fuel consumption, what gear the vehicle is in, and speed of cornering. This is Ocado’s version of the Internet of Things.
Competition:
Win a £100 Ocado shop delivered to your door In Ocado’s warehouses of the near future, thousands of robots will pick goods and pack cartons for delivery to customers all over the UK. But controlling all these machines accurately in a vast area is tricky. So Ocado and the technology company Cambridge Consultants have developed an entirely new wireless system that can communicate with each robot up to 10 times a
second and could scale to even larger operations. The new system uses 4G telecoms technology and broadcasts in the same 5GHz part of the radio spectrum used by Wi-Fi. Ocado says this kind of coordination is a key building block in automating everything from warehouses and factories to building sites and airfields. Now Ocado is asking readers to suggest a name for its revolutionary
new robot communication system. The best idea will be rewarded with £100 of Ocado shopping delivered to their home at a time of their choice (or an equivalent prize). The competition closes on 31 December 2016 with the winner announced early next year. To enter the competition and to see the terms and conditions, visit the competition website at: newscientist.com/ocado
On each delivery route, the driver finds the tablet loaded with the satnav route around the customers’ addresses. As the deliveries progress, the route can be modified to take traffic congestion into account. The onboard sensors play other roles too. The temperature in the refrigerated part of the grocery compartment is constantly monitored in case of problems. If the temperature sensor fails there is even a spare, since food safety is paramount, says Leigh. All this adds up to a huge amount of data. Every day, Ocado’s cloud servers store 580,000 GPS positions and 8 million routing data points. The result for the 500,000 active customer base? At least 95 per cent of deliveries are on time or early, and order accuracy is above 99 per cent, says James Donkin, Ocado’s general manager of technology. If making the vans so clever sounds like overkill, says Leigh, think of it this way: “The amount of technology we’ve designed in could make the difference between your shopping fitting in the back or not.” n More at: www.ocadotechnology.com
When data delivers
Number-crunching big data sets reveals commercial insights that can continually improve a business. And leading the way is the online retailer Ocado WHEN Shiv Kaushal clicks a mouse button, pinpricks of light begin to glow on a video wall. Soon, fine, brightly-coloured lines emanate from those points and, as they spread across the screen, they split and branch out, looking for all the world like brain cells sprouting synapses. But this is no neural network infographic: it’s a real-time plot of an online delivery business, its vehicles percolating across Britain from dawn til dusk and beyond. What fuels this powerful visualisation? Big data. Kaushal is software development manager at UK-based Ocado, one of the most technologically advanced online retailers in the world. He’s able to watch the company’s thousands of Mercedes delivery vans plying the streets in real time because they beam huge volumes of operational data into cloud servers, where algorithms mine it for insights that can improve the business. Kaushal’s powerful mapping application on the video wall is just one result of that effort. The same data lets managers zoom in to find out if a van is running early or late. “The mapping application lets us see how this might have a knock-on effect so we can give customers updated grocery delivery times,” Kaushal says. Being responsive through technology is vital to Ocado; for its main business of online grocery delivery but also for the generalpurpose online retail platforms Ocado has built for other businesses. For instance, UK supermarket Morrisons relies on Ocado to manage its entire online grocery business. And Ocado has used its expertise in the grocery market to spin out an online pet supplies retailer, Fetch, a kitchenware vendor, Sizzle, and a beauty store in collaboration with Marie Claire called Fabled.
Ocado believes that the best way to stay ahead of the competition is to be at the leading edge of cloud-based technology. And that needs feeding with data - lots of it. Ocado then uses that data to make smart predictions and recommendations which help its customers make more informed buying decisions. All this is powered by complex machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms developed by an inhouse data science team. Ocado also uses big data and cloud technologies to solve its own version of one of computer science’s toughest challenges the travelling salesman problem. The problem is this: given a list of locations, find the shortest route that visits them all once before returning to base. It is tough because the number of permutations quickly becomes mind-boggling as the number of cities grows. In Ocado’s case, that problem translates to: given an average of 5-20 addresses to visit with groceries - the typical van’s capacity what is the best route for thousands of vans? “Every van route is an instance of the travelling salesman problem. We have to use our data and some clever algorithms to find the optimal solution because you cannot check all the permutations by brute force,” says Evan Innis, manager of Ocado’s data science group. Once that optimal route is calculated, it can be further complicated by parking problems, traffic congestion and tower blocks with outof-order lifts. Feeding the data into the route calculation to allow for those confounding factors is one of his group’s tasks. How do they do that? One way is by fitting the vans with a wide range of sensors, says Matthew Leigh, Ocado’s fleet technical specialist. Each van includes a rugged tablet
The data from Ocado’s vans allows a real-time visualisation of the company’s deliveries across the country
PC that serves as a general purpose customer information terminal and satnav. Above that is a windscreen-mounted dashcam with one lens trained on the road ahead and another on the driver to record significant events that may occur. Below the dash is a wireless GPS unit that uses a cellphone or Wi-Fi signal to beam data to the cloud, including temperature, wheel speed, GPS, engine revs, fuel consumption, what gear the vehicle is in, and speed of cornering. This is Ocado’s version of the Internet of Things.
Competition:
Win a £100 Ocado shop delivered to your door In Ocado’s warehouses of the near future, thousands of robots will pick goods and pack cartons for delivery to customers all over the UK. But controlling all these machines accurately in a vast area is tricky. So Ocado and the technology company Cambridge Consultants have developed an entirely new wireless system that can communicate with each robot up to 10 times a
second and could scale to even larger operations. The new system uses 4G telecoms technology and broadcasts in the same 5GHz part of the radio spectrum used by Wi-Fi. Ocado says this kind of coordination is a key building block in automating everything from warehouses and factories to building sites and airfields. Now Ocado is asking readers to suggest a name for its revolutionary
new robot communication system. The best idea will be rewarded with £100 of Ocado shopping delivered to their home at a time of their choice (or an equivalent prize). The competition closes on 31 December 2016 with the winner announced early next year. To enter the competition and to see the terms and conditions, visit the competition website at: newscientist.com/ocado
On each delivery route, the driver finds the tablet loaded with the satnav route around the customers’ addresses. As the deliveries progress, the route can be modified to take traffic congestion into account. The onboard sensors play other roles too. The temperature in the refrigerated part of the grocery compartment is constantly monitored in case of problems. If the temperature sensor fails there is even a spare, since food safety is paramount, says Leigh. All this adds up to a huge amount of data. Every day, Ocado’s cloud servers store 580,000 GPS positions and 8 million routing data points. The result for the 500,000 active customer base? At least 95 per cent of deliveries are on time or early, and order accuracy is above 99 per cent, says James Donkin, Ocado’s general manager of technology. If making the vans so clever sounds like overkill, says Leigh, think of it this way: “The amount of technology we’ve designed in could make the difference between your shopping fitting in the back or not.” n More at: www.ocadotechnology.com