Touchless Logistics for Home Delivery

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an increased interest in redesigning activities so that they are touchless. Most of the current logistics activities associated with transporting consumer goods result in multiple touches as packages are loaded onto trucks and into warehouses and then delivered to stores or the home.

For home delivery, single-use packaging is often used to reduce contagion, and, typically, a vehicle delivers to multiple homes along a route, resulting in each delivery to a home containing touches of all the homes visited.

Making most of these existing delivery processes touchless has not been justifiable on economic grounds. Still, ever-increasing levels of automation are likely after seeing the high cost of shutting down much of the economy during this pandemic.

A better long-term strategy is to reenvision the entire process of delivering an item to the home so that it is inherently touchless. Instead of adding extra cost, the use of fully automated (and thereby touchless) loading and unloading processes is the only way to make on-demand, direct deliveries to the home cost-effective.

Another significant benefit of this type of home delivery is that, after a vehicle makes a delivery, it can be loaded with empty containers from earlier deliveries to be returned to stores for cleaning and reuse, making it feasible to reuse containers instead of using disposable, single-use packaging.

Touchless delivery and reusable containers are two of the benefits of this type of redesign of the process of delivering goods to the home. More broadly, this type of design would eliminate the need for a person ever to visit a store, which is especially valuable today given the need to isolate socially, and, in the longer term, would make it easier for the elderly or disabled to live comfortably in their home.