ACI Logistix is a rapidly growing parcel logistics and delivery organization with a national footprint and sustained double-digit growth. This innovative company focuses on small parcel delivery within the US for a variety of clients both domestic and international.

ACI Logistix is growing. As the pandemic unfolded, ACI Logistix saw opportunities to innovate as consumer appetite for delivery boomed. How might ACI grow business with clients whose products required special handling?

From express deliveries to temperature controlled products, returns, and dispositions, ACI’s current infrastructure and partners did not support the specialized services ACI customers were asking for.

Executive leadership stood ready to make a significant innovation investment — but they wanted to do so wisely. Rather than rushing down an unknown road, ACI Logistix hired Altus Nova to help the team:

• Explore and model available options for handling specialized deliveries.
• Understand the organizational capabilities required to execute reliably.
• Rationalize the budget, timing, and size-of-opportunity needed to do so profitably.

ACI Logistix sees innovation as a way to grow. But they also wanted to avoid potential missteps with a clear picture of required business transformations to get from idea to ROI. Altus Nova jumped in to map it out.

Altus Nova began with an extensive analysis of the company’s current operations based on real-world data. A series of executive interviews, in-depth sessions with front-line personnel, and site visits to both ACI Logistix and partner facilities ensued.

To investigate potential service augmentation and development scenarios, Altus Nova also compared the feasibility of logistics models popularized by providers such as Uber Eats, Roadie, and DoorDash.

Meticulous documentation and ongoing collaboration kept the whole team updated as Altus Nova investigated. From facility operations to sorting, staging, pickup, tracking, exception handling, and returns, Altus Nova left no detail undiscovered.

Having gained a first-hand understanding of ACI strengths, weaknesses, and gaps between current and desired capabilities, Altus Nova carefully assessed a number of potential specialty strategies. Altus Nova also offered a rationalized picture of the investment level — and market volume — it would take to make this journey profitable.

Each scenario Altus Nova proposed offered step-by-step capability advances that would allow ACI Logistix to gain experience with specialized services while while building the volume needed to do so profitably.

Altus Nova uncovered a clear list of capabilities ACI Logistix would need to develop or transform in order to provide specialized services. Examples ranged from label creation and augmented tracking to updated automation and containerization — all backed by the right technologies.

To clarify business requirements and opportunities, Altus Nova delivered detailed models and analyses to guide ACI Logistix in making a smart investment.

• Process Models: Altus Nova delivered an end-to-end process analysis for each scenario across a crawl-walk-run roadmap.
• Cost Analysis: Altus Nova provided detailed cost analysis including manual and automated processing across every container, storage, and change-of-custody requirement, including volume and density needed to rationalize investment.
• Process Optimization Analysis: Altus Nova conducted a rigorous machine learning analysis of potential permutations needed to optimize processing, minimize delays, and reduce costs.
  

With models and analysis completed, Altus Nova prioritized and provided measurement approaches for key performance indicators that would reveal ACI Logistix’ success in maintaining reliability while capturing ROI:

• Client Onboarding
• Facility Efficiency & Readiness
• Address Quality & Reliability
• Partner Efficiency & Reliability
• Profitability
• Customer Satisfaction
• Partner Satisfaction
• SLAs & Scorecards
  

Further, Altus Nova created a detailed technology roadmap — including risk mitigation analysis — to guide ACI Logistix in pursuit of providing specialty services.

• Journey mapping: Delivered end-to-end user journey maps to set the stage for quality and reliability.
• Product roadmap: Provided a prioritized feature list to establish capabilities and crawl-walk-run with minimal build-out implications for the primary origin facility.
• Technology roadmap: Identified the best platforms for process optimization, tracking, and customer experience management.
• Operating cost projections: Projected software licensing, implementation and customization costs together with resourcing plan to develop necessary in-house expertise.
• Risk mitigation: Offered mitigation recommendations for 40+ key risk areas to ensure both internal and partner risks were accounted for, and to position ACI as a single point of accountability to customers.
  

ACI had a vision of ultimately leveraging crowd-sourced capacity to reliably deliver specialized products to the doorstep but wanted to thoroughly investigate other options to determine the right mix for the company at different stages of maturity.

Altus Nova evaluated and stack-ranked numerous categories for risks to success relative to each execution scenario. This helped to quantify the risk dimension for each scenario (in addition to the cost and value dimensions of the potential project) in order to ensure success.

Altus Nova’s risk managed approach of “eating the elephant one bite at a time” takes small steps where each step delivers features that produce some measurable value (in blue), builds the organizational muscle memory around a new set of features (organizational adoption), takes on a limited set of risks (in red) and finishes by having thoroughly addressed those risks (in green). After each milestone, Altus Nova will have developed and delivered a valuable set of capabilities for ACI (in gray).

In each delivery scenario, Altus Nova explored the User Journeys for the key parties in the delivery process.