Arvato presents Carrier Award for the first time

"Our clients demand high quality and transparency from us in the provision of and compliance with certain key performance indicators. We also demand this transparency from our service providers," says Berthold Reinke, Vice President Transport Management at Arvato Supply Chain Solutions, explaining the decision to create the award. The prize was awarded in five categories. The award ceremony was purely digital.

Across Europe, the best transport partner was determined in terms of "Best On Time Performance" (delivery reliability), "Best Customer Service", "Best B2C Capabilities" (end customer orientation) and "Best Collaboration". In addition, there was a special award in the "Special Performance" category on a theme that changes every year - this year for the carrier who communicated and acted best during the Corona crisis.

The basis for the evaluation is the full-year performance and comparable data base of each service provider - whether global player, medium-sized company, CEP or general cargo service provider. More than 800 million data points from the system are analyzed. Berthold Reinke: "Using this data, we can quickly see who is performing well in which areas and who still needs to improve. And it also shows that large service providers are not always automatically set, but that smaller niche providers can also be ahead in certain areas." In addition, another 50,000 data points are included in the evaluation every month, for which Arvato surveys its employees online about their cooperation with transport service providers.

"Best On Time Performance" winner was Post NL (Netherlands), which scored points for consistently high performance and high network stability in all phases of 2020. "Keeping to the promised delivery time is immensely important for us," emphasizes Berthold Reinke. "After all, high delivery reliability always reduces follow-up costs. Experience shows that the faster the goods are delivered, the lower the return rate." Criteria for the evaluation include delivery performance, status data quality and delivery stability per week. Here, the individual service providers were very close to each other. "In terms of delivery reliability, there was only a 1.5 percent difference in performance between first and second place," explains Kevin Stommen, responsible for Carrier Management at Arvato Supply Chain Solutions.

The best carrier in the "Best Customer Service" category, which is primarily about professional cooperation in day-to-day business, was by far the Polish service provider InPost. Once again, the online survey of Arvato employees was taken into account and analyzed from the 50,000 data points. Kevin Stommen: "In some cases, we would like service providers to provide even faster feedback on inquiries about lost shipments or transit time deviations - and better advance information in the case of major network delays."

Carrier DHL-Paket (Germany) showed the strongest end-customer orientation of the individual service providers as the winner of the "Best B2C Capabilities" category. Evaluation criteria here include the number of pick-up and drop-off points (parcel stations) per 10,000 inhabitants, the reliability of guaranteed transit times, the offer of mobile returns solutions, next-day delivery options and options for shipment redirections. Overall, the postal operators' performance in this category was very close.

The "Best Collaboration" award was narrowly won by United Parcel Service (Germany). The decisive evaluation parameters in this case, especially from a procurement perspective, are "transparency in negotiations," "price stability" and the "quality of communication."

The special prize, the topic which is determined each year, was awarded this year by Arvato Supply Chain Solutions for the information behavior of carriers in the first Corona phase. Performance parameters for this included the type and quality of communication, updates per week and number of service increments. The company Trans-o-flex/Thermomed (Germany), which provided daily unsolicited information on the status of the network during the Corona pandemic, which countries had which last-mile restrictions and which challenges were encountered by recipients, stood out as exemplary and was thus the winner of the "Special Award". But Kevin Stommen also praises the next-ranked companies: "They all created real added value for our organization with their information behavior, because it enabled us to inform our customers about restrictions in good time."

For Berthold Reinke, it was remarkable how well the logistics industry as a whole demonstrated its stability and flexibility during the Corona phase: "We didn't experience any supply bottlenecks and always got the capacities we needed to supply our customers with goods. In short, you can rely on the industry."