- Walmart says its use of honeycomb-style map segments is helping expand same-day delivery.
- More accurate maps enable the company to reach 12 million more households in the US.
- Walmart says nearly a third of its e-commerce orders are fulfilled in less than 3 hours.
Walmart is taking a lesson from the humble honeybee in its quest to make its deliveries as fast as possible.
The retail giant already boasts a formidable store count of 4,700 locations across the US, which puts it within a short drive of more than 90% of households.
But in order to grow its reach without necessarily having to build new supercenters, Walmart says it has been using a relatively new hexagonal map segmentation — a change from the conventional ZIP code or radius-based strategies that are commonly used in determining delivery areas.
Walmart says the strategy allows it to better understand where customers are and which stores have what they want.
As bees have long known, hexagons can be an excellent shape for making the most of a given space, and Walmart says the more precise maps allow it to reach an additional 12 million US households with same-day delivery.
“This is helping us to adapt how we service our customers, by allowing us to go from a fixed-mile radius into a much more dynamic catchment area that caters to the needs of the customers that a particular store will serve,” Walmart global tech senior director of engineering Parthibban Raja told Fast Company in December, following a pilot of the concept.
Walmart says its platform uses a combination of its own data and open-source software to create new delivery zones.
Some examples from other mapping experts show how the hexagonal segments are particularly effective at analyzing drive times from one part of a city or town to another. After all, one store might be located slightly farther away from a shopper’s house than another, but that extra distance may not matter in a meaningful way if it follows a major roadway.
As location data service Esri puts it, “hexagons are preferable when your analysis includes aspects of connectivity or movement paths.”
Figuring out how to get a customer’s eggs, bread, and milk from the store to their front door as quickly as possible certainly fits that description.
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