Challenges and opportunities in attended home delivery

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on home delivery, and, more specifically, on attended home delivery, where the consumer must be present for the delivery. To provide a high service level and to avoid delivery failures as much as possible, it is customary in attended home delivery services for the company to offer the customer a choice of narrow delivery time slots. The objective of this chapter is to highlight and illustrate issues arising in attended home delivery related to these time slots and to present and discuss promising approaches for addressing some of them. We will use Peapod, one of the more successful e-grocers, as an illustrative example. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008.