Nextway: Open Source Last Mile Delivery System For MSMEs

Abstract

As the industry of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in the Philippines grew over the years and contributed much to the economy, opportunities and challenges to the last mile delivery came along with the demand. No business-to- customer (B2C) transactions are complete without product fulfillment. Last mile delivery is the last leg of moving goods from hubs to customers in the supply chain. Such services existed in the Philippines as third-party logistics (3PL) solutions. While MSMEs may simply tap into these 3PLs, this study has proposed and demonstrated that open-source solutions could integrate into their existing logistics and delivery teams.

The Nextway project has developed cost-effective and reliable solutions to aid small companies, drivers, and customers. Considering the economic aspect of MSMEs, a significant capital expense was found unnecessary for adopting their last mile delivery solution. Various literature has proven that a last mile delivery system is a considerable asset and investment a business in the scale of MSME could acquire. In particular, the pilot implementation of this study for the client has solved the challenges of digitization of data, receiving orders and tracking physical packages into warehouses, designation of delivery personnel, tracking of the loaded packages into the vehicle, and providing meaningful information to drivers. The Nextway backend has utilized the open-source Odoo community edition as a provider of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) aspect of the business.

The pilot implementation of the developed system also highlighted the importance of using Metodología para la selección de sistemas ERP (MSSE) or System Selection Methodology for careful system selection. In addition, the Enterprise System Experience Cycle was selected as the overall guiding methodology and adoption assessment. This study has contributed to the research and practical use of the provided system designs for both on-premises and cloud service provider deployments, whichever future potential adopters need. Along with those were suggestions for future work, such as a cloud-edge continuum approach to further provide reliable services to the drivers and customers in rural areas with limited network connectivity.