Livestock Services Provider Improves Operational Efficiency and Lowers Costs with NextBillion.ai

About the Company

The customer offers livestock services tailored towards Australia’s Northern Territory. The company’s primary service offerings include farm management; transport; mustering; and buying, selling and hiring of farm equipment. Their primary focus areas are the butcher shop and livestock transportation markets.

The Problem Statement

The customer reached out to NextBillion.ai with two main pain points:

1. Pricing – They were on the lookout for a map API service provider that offers flexible pricing models that work well with scale
2. Comprehensive mapping data for Australia – They wanted to leverage a mapping platform that could comprehensively cover all key geographies of the Australian continent

The customer was using Google’s Distance Matrix service, along with a primary algorithm they developed internally, to provide their delivery drivers with the optimal routes for each day’s deliveries.

However, the customer’s daily delivery volumes went far beyond the capacity of Google’s limited 25×25 matrix size. Because of this, routing and optimization for their daily operations would take several individual calls of the Google Distance Matrix API, which, in turn, raised costs.

As the customer’s product offering matured, they found that they required more control over the routes generated by their system. For example, it would be beneficial at times to split deliveries between two drivers in the most efficient possible way, or add some waypoints with clauses like ‘must deliver before an assigned time’.

Our Solution:

To cater to the customer’s requirements, NextBillion.ai provided a solution that combined the capabilities of its large Distance Matrix API. We helped the customer evaluate the large Distance Matrix API and test it with 25+ deliveries.

1. Distance Matrix API – NextBillion.ai’s Distance Matrix API pricing included free API calls for up to 100K calls. Due to the API’s large matrix size of 5000×5000 elements, the client was able execute route optimization in just a single call of the API, and thus, eliminate costs associated with calling Google’s API multiple times.

Key Takeaways:

At the end of the evaluatory period, the customer noted that NextBillion.ai’s solution helped them overcome their major pain points. They expressed their intention to continue the engagement to meet their operational and business objectives. Through flexible and customizable APIs, coupled with a dedicated support team, we helped the customer focus on improving operational efficiency and lower operating costs.

To summarize, the customer was able to achieve the following benefits with large Distance Matrix APIs: