Cynthia Thompson
Zip Code Service Upgrade using ArcView
ArcView is being used as the decision support tool in a nation wide service upgrade project at FedEx. Federal Express defines Priority Overnight service delivery commitments based on zip code location from the station. Data in support of this project was compiled from company based mainframe files, purchased spatial data - zip code and streets - drive times derived from Allocate in ArcInfo, and competitor service information.
ArcView's tools of query, join, display, summarize, and calculate are the basis for this analysis. Using a spatial approach will provide a more accurate solution for our time critical company.
Fed Ex - Money-Back Guarantee
FedEx Priority Overnight is a time-definite service delivered by 10:30 AM (referred to as AA), noon (referred to as AM), or 4:30 PM (referred to as PM) the next business day within the continental United States. These AA, AM, or PM service commitments are zip code driven. Since we offer a money-back guarantee if the shipment arrives even 60 seconds late, it is critical that the distance from the station delivery point to the network of streets serving the zip code is known. This is where ArcView becomes important.
FedEx wanted to upgrade as many zip codes within the continental U.S. as was possible. This was a monumental task and to do this without a GIS tool would have been impossible.
Our Plan
Our plan was to train several of our field engineers in ArcView and supply them with the data to start looking at our potential upgrade areas. First we geocoded all our stations. Next we ran the Allocate command in ArcInfo to create an impedance measure from the station to every street arc within the station's service area, and then we added current service commitment data by street arc. We then cut the street data to CD-ROM in shapefile format along with other pertinent themes.
Our engineers knew the time the couriers leave the station to start their Priority Overnight (PO) deliveries. Using ArcView's Table Export capability, they could export the necessary fields from the CD-ROM theme data and save it into a dbase file format on their hard drives. They could then Add the Table, start Editing, and populate a new field called "first stop time" by adding the PO leave building time with the impedance time in minutes. This was some tricky Avenue code which is shown below.
((Date.Make("9:30 AM", "h:m AMPM")+[impedance].AsMinutes).SetFormat("hh:m AMPM")).AsString
In the above Avenue code, 9:30 is the leave building time for the station.
This resulting table was then Joined by cover# back to the street theme. With the Legend Editor, the Legend Type of "graduated symbol" was used on the field classification of "first stop time". With a zip code polygon theme overlaid, you could visually see the streets within a zip code area that could all be driven to by 10:00 AM.
Exporting another table, we could Summarize the impedance field by the zip left attribute in the street data. We then Joined the resulting table with some competitor service data by zip, and could quickly Query the table to determine the zip code areas that had a maximum impedance time of say 11:00 AM and we had a later service commitment than our competitor data showed.
CONCLUSION
The engineers were excited with ArcView and all the possible analytical possibilities that it allows. The service upgrade project was done in a timely and cost effective manner for FedEx.
Cynthia Thompson
Federal Express Corporation
Technical Advisor
2831 Airways Boulevard
Memphis, Tennessee 38138
Telephone:(901) 395-7388
Fax:(901) 395-7451