250+
CLIENTS
5M
ORDERS PER YEAR
About Active Ants
Active Ants was founded in 2010 to make e-fulfillment more accurate and efficient through innovation and automation. Today, it’s one of the largest fulfillment players in the Netherlands.
Challenge
No direct insight into irregularities during delivery
“In mid-2021, our customers’ call for more insight into the performance of the carriers we use became increasingly clear and louder,” says Roeland Lengers, IT Director at Active Ants.
“Tracking shipments is a non-essential activity for Active Ants. Our core activity is sending packages as quickly as possible. We soon realized that uniform tracking of shipment statuses could work as a ‘black box’ for us.”
Solution
Unique shipping insights enable Active Ants’ fulfilment clients to automate customer service processes
“Make or buy” decision
Rather than having to secure additional internal resources, Active Ants decided to look for an existing solution to offer an extra service for their customers to stay ahead of the competition.
Roeland explained: “The choice fell on Tracey because it was a young and innovative company where we could express our wishes. Together, we were able to connect the mutual systems quickly and adequately. I’m bold enough to say that Tracey also learned a thing or two from Active Ants during that time.”
Using Shipping Intelligence as a black box
With Shipping Intelligence (formerly Tracey), Active Ants receives the most important status transitions and exceptions per shipment without having to poll carriers.
They used this data to build KPI screens within Maya, based on WebComponents. “In my view, this is a successful example of the right ‘make or buy’ decision,” Roeland added.
The Shipping Intelligence plug-and-play visuals standardize data from different carriers, making it easy to evaluate a carrier’s performance and compare it to other carriers — eliminating the need for expensive, separate BI solutions.
Automated customer service processes and more insight into carrier performance
Right now, problems with various parcel carriers are detected within 30 minutes and sent back to the Active Ants system. With this, the retailer clients of Active Ants can automate the customer service processes to proactively keep the end consumer informed.
“We pass on the data we receive from Tracey to our customers, enabling them to derive value from it. This ensures that, as Active Ants, we offer just that little bit of extra service to support our customers in their e-commerce activities.” Jean Lahaye, Co-founder Active Ants
Impact
Calculated events allow Active Ants to
detect shipping issues 10+ hours before carriers
Shipping data analysis offer a solid basis for predictions about the timely and error-free delivery of parcels – enabling Active Ants to offer exceptional service to their customers, but also helping further improve Sendcloud’s Shipping Intelligence.
“These machine learning models are currently being trained, but are already showing results with an accuracy of 89% or higher. This means that we already predict delays with a high degree of certainty and can provide feedback more than 10 hours before the carrier itself,” says Sander Hak, former Product Manager of Tracey (now Shipping Intelligence).
“We see that our customers anticipate the data that we share and adjust their work processes to inform their customers better and more proactively.”
Jean Lahaye
Co-founder, Active Ants
89%+
ACCURACY OF
DELIVERY PREDICTIONS
<30
MINS TO DETECT
A SHIPMENT ISSUE
10+
HOURS AHEAD
OF CARRIERS
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