See how customers optimized operations with Amazon Location
Amazon Location Service enabled customers to easily and rapidly add location capabilities such as maps, places, routes, geofences, and trackers to applications. With Amazon Location Service, customers focus on solving their business problem without worrying about cost, quality, privacy and integration challenges.
PostNL is the number one e-commerce and postal logistics provider in the Netherlands. On a given weekday, PostNL delivers on average 1.1 million parcels and 8.1 million letters throughout Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, connecting the physical and the digital world. PostNL is doing a lot more than delivering mail and parcels. It helps business customers to be successful, for example, by providing support in direct and online marketing, robotised order processing, or temperature-controlled medical transport.
Digital transformation to be everyone's favorite deliverer
As an organization, PostNL wants to be everyone’s favorite parcel and mail deliverer. As customer demands are increasing, they want to reinforce this position by accelerating the digitalization of their customer experience and their own logistic networks and processes, to ensure shipments are moved swiftly, efficiently and sustainably from collection, to sorting and to delivery.
“We’ve implemented Amazon Location Service in our IoT platform to track the movement of a quarter-million unique loading devices (ULDs), known as roller cages, which are a critical component of our logistical network,” said Sander Heije, Platform Owner Internet of Things, PostNL. “Previously, tracking ULDs in the network was difficult because we weren’t able to monitor the assets as they’re moved around and stored. With the implementation of Amazon Location Service, we can easily monitor our ULDs, which will generate important savings for our operation. We can now maximize ULD usage so they don’t sit idle and customers always have the right amount of ULDs in case they have a surge in deliveries. This real-time visibility to track and analyze assets with Amazon Location Service, especially at our scale, has spurred multiple initiatives to further optimize the logistics of our supply chain."
“Amazon Location Service has opened up two key marketplaces previously closed off by limitations in other digital location-based services. One is the expansion of routing, matrix routing and asset tracking for truck-specific deliveries, allowing customers to drive intelligent decision-making insights for heavy road transportation operators. This has helped us identify underutilized truck loads by rerouting those trucks to unfulfilled jobs, which has resulted in significant cost savings and increased profitability by up to 30%. The second market opportunity is geocoding, reverse geocoding and storing of address location records, using the Places API. While we evaluated other solutions, we determined that Amazon Location offered better terms of use, allowing us to store geo-located address information, thus reducing annual geocoding costs for our customers by more than 90%, while also removing onerous compliance processes from their workflows", said Stuart Grant, Co-Founder of Geo.me."
Command Alkon delivers technology solutions for the global heavy construction industry. The 45 year old company is an innovator in the industry and creates leading-edge software and automation systems for customers across the world.
“We needed to have a geofencing solution built, released, and approved by a state department of transportation within 4 weeks so our customer could deliver on a new contract, otherwise the state would withhold payment. The urgency was driven by a new state regulation to provide touchless and electronic proof of delivery of construction materials to paving project sites,” said Charles Evans, Chief Technology Officer at Command Alkon. “The required solution involved complexity because both the delivery trucks and pavers are constantly moving, which meant tracking when two moving objects meet. Initially, we weren’t able to find a provider that could satisfy this need in real-time, and considered doing the analysis as a post-processed report that would not be in real-time and would be harder to implement."
"When we discovered Amazon Location Service, we realized that we could implement the necessary functionality in real-time, using Trackers and Geofences. We designed the application to track and trigger when the delivery truck enters or exits the delivery geographical boundary, this acts as confirmation that materials are delivered to the site and creates the digital record for the necessary parties involved. Since it was so easy to get started and implement Amazon Location Service, our application was up and running in production in 2 weeks. Our ability to develop at this speed ensured readiness for the state department of transportation review date. We’ve done the review with the state and they approved our solution, we are now rolling it out to multiple company divisions for their upcoming state regulatory needs.”
“Our development time from prototype to production was incredibly fast, the fact that Amazon Location Service integrates so well with other AWS services accelerated our development. Specifically, the integration with Amazon EventBridge which enables the event-driven architecture of the application to trigger an event when the trucks enter and exit the geofence. Additionally, because Amazon Location Service integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), that helped us set up permissions correctly and in the right order. Amazon Location Service will now be one of our ‘go-to’ AWS services when we need location functionality in our applications.”
TCS Business and Technology Services help enterprises become future ready with its offerings across the digital technologies including Cloud, IoT, Business Operations, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, Data and Analytics, Quality Engineering and Automation. TCS combines tech expertise and business intelligence to catalyze change and deliver results.
“TCS was approached to build the London Marathon events application on a scalable platform to facilitate virtual participation of runners. TCS developed a green field application on AWS that synthesizes geo-location information from smart phone GPS data. Amazon Location Service map-tiles enabled friends and family to view the current location of marathon runners. Native map views supported high-quality geospatial 2D street views. TCS was able to support 100k global participants during the 2021 London Marathon,” said Mark Bogaerts, TCS - Director of Brand & Sponsorships, Europe & UK.
Mitsubishi Corporation (MC) is a global integrated business enterprise that develops and operates businesses together with its offices and subsidiaries in approximately 90 countries and regions worldwide, as well as a global network of around 1,700 group companies. MC has 10 Business Groups that operate across virtually every industry: Natural Gas, Industrial Materials, Petroleum & Chemicals, Mineral Resources, Industrial Infrastructure, Automotive & Mobility, Food Industry, Consumer Industry, Power Solution and Urban Development.
“We use Amazon Location Service for our bike sharing application to track the location of our customers, in order to create a more personalized customer experience. Based on the location of our customers and customer attributes, we were able to deliver 75% more relevant local-tour-related recommendations helping to create a more personalized sightseeing experience. We were able to build real-time map visualization for devices equipped with IoT in two days, increasing speed to market by five days. We did consider another location-based solution, but we felt Amazon Location was the most attractive service for us. It linked data with our solution on AWS and we were able to leverage our other global location provider HERE,” said Koji Tashiro, GM Mitsubishi.
MobileLog is a service that helps businesses track and trace their deliveries and vehicles in real time. Starting at only €15 per month, MobileLog helps businesses track their mobile assets, view dispatches on maps, send orders to drivers, and even get seamless feedback from customers. The company has been building their service on AWS for over a decade. With AWS, MobileLog has been able to build their product nimbly, scale operations and reliably serve the needs of large organizations such as newspapers and delivery companies. The MobileLog service integrates with virtually any established logistics system, but sometimes customers need help outside of the product, including education and consulting.
“As a lean organization, we’re always looking for ways to reduce complexity, so we can focus more on helping our customers,” said Dejan Milosavljevic, CEO and Co-Founder of MobileLog. “When we evaluated Amazon Location Service, we realized we can get the tracking capabilities we need, and also consolidate location-related infrastructure we were hosting on another provider. We’re also reducing the number of microservices that we have to maintain, because Amazon Location already provides them. The simplification that Amazon Location enables is a huge benefit to us, and I expect it will help us cut overall costs and speed up our development cycles.”
Novetta is an advanced analytics company that specializes in extracting clarity from the noisy complexity of big data at the speed and scale of the most intensive national security missions. Novetta pioneers disruptive technologies in machine learning, full-spectrum cyber, cloud engineering, DevSecOps, data, open source, and multi-INT analytics for Defense, Intelligence Community, and Federal Law Enforcement customers. Many Novetta solutions, including Ageon ISR, AIDE, CLAVIN, and Novetta Mission Analytics, incorporate mapping, geofencing, and geolocation as additional analytics layers. Amazon Location Service gives Novetta new options to deliver deeper cloud integration in conjunction with services such as AWS IoT Greengrass, Amazon Neptune, and Amazon Rekognition.
"We're excited to work with AWS on Amazon Location Service," said Kevin Heald, VP, Information Exploitation at Novetta. "Our DoD and intelligence community partners rely on us to deliver technologies that integrate cutting-edge AWS capabilities to enable mission success. Amazon Location is a great example of a service that can be applied to accelerate and simplify solution development."
Coolstays puts a new twist on finding that perfect weekend rental in the country or city flat, they don’t just offer a place to stay but the place actually becomes your ‘experience’. With a focus on showcasing unique and unusual places to stay across the UK, Europe and beyond, Coolstays now has 3million monthly page views and nearly 400,000 users. Coolstays continues to grow rapidly due to pent-up demand from Covid lockdowns in the past year. Coolstays relies on AWS solutions for a majority of its features and functionalities.
“At Coolstays, we use interactive maps across our search result pages, commonly accommodating hundreds of properties at once. As these pages receive our highest rates of traffic, delivering the maps fast and cost efficiently to thousands of users is always a top priority for us,” said Nick Wills, Technical Director & Co-founder at Coolstays. “Shortly after the launch of Amazon Location Service, our team jumped at the chance of migrating our existing map infrastructure for increased speed and reduction of cost in comparison to the service we were using. We are thrilled with the results, we saw a 28% improvement in tile load speed and a 50% decrease in cost compared to our previous provider. Amazon’s clear documentation allowed us to quickly understand how the location-based functionality could be added. Additionally it’s been beneficial to use Amazon Location Service because our developers can more easily consume services that use a similar approach to other AWS services, reducing our learning curve and making the billing management much easier.”
TensorIoT creates solutions that help enterprises incorporate edge computing and data into daily operations to improve business outcomes. As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, TensorIoT works with customers in industries spanning manufacturing, telecommunications, energy, food production, and retail to build solutions using IoT, machine learning, and cloud technologies.
"An important element for many of our customers’ edge applications is location, helping them to understand what is happening where in their global operations,” said Ravikumar Raghunathan, CEO at TensorIoT. “Unfortunately, adding and using relevant location data has been too difficult for many customers. Now, using Amazon Location Service’s standard API, we can build and deploy custom solutions for our clients, no matter where they are in the world using the best location data for the use case and region. In addition to our system integration projects with Amazon Location, we are planning to use the service to improve and build new location-related features in our off-the-shelf solutions such as SmartInsights and our asset tracking kit.”
Azit is a Mobility as a Service company that aims to connect people in motion by providing a last mile transportation service throughout Japan.
“Last year, we launched Crew Express, a new Delivery-as-a-Service platform that gives businesses and general consumers a comprehensive solution for last mile delivery,” said Masato Sogame, co-founder, CTO, Azit. “We chose Amazon Location Service because it allowed us to get up-and-running quickly and its pay-as-you-go pricing was perfectly suited for our business. With Amazon Location, we were able to implement a new feature that estimates arrival times in just a few weeks, rather than the months it could have taken if we tried to build it ourselves.”
“The cost of our previous mapping solution was preventing us from scaling and innovating with maps and points of interest. We’ve been able to integrate Amazon Location into our mobile apps and in doing so, we’ve been able to increase the number of orders per transaction, per customer. Since moving to the service, we’ve also seen savings of more than 78%. The cost savings and the integration of Amazon Location Services into other AWS Services made the decision to switch easy. In addition, the use of tools like Amazon QuickSight and Amazon SageMaker allowed for real-time monitoring of key business data across multiple integration points. Along with our agile approach, this has freed up capacity to innovate and focus on delivering new products & features for our customers." - Rey Benher CTO
Jollibee Group is one of fastest-growing restaurant companies in the world with 17 brands operating over 6,300 stores across 34 countries. Its brands include Jollibee, Chowking, Mang Inasal, Greenwich, Red Ribbon, and franchises of Burger King and Panda Express.
“Mapping tools are essential in food delivery apps and having a reliable and accurate online mapping solution is important for us,” said Alexander Magtipon, AVP & Head, Solution Architecture & DevOps, Jollibee Group. “By having GrabMaps available in Amazon Location Service, it opens new opportunities for us to further improve our food delivery services. We are excited to take advantage of the improved data quality that Grab relies on for its own operations, as well as the ease of integration and cost efficiency that AWS provides.”
Luce SG is an on-demand home services platform that allows anyone to easily book services they need for their home and office, from cleaning to aircon servicing. Our mission is to take care of our customers’ living space, so they have more time to live, work, and play.
“As we expand into Indonesia and the Philippines, it has been challenging for us to obtain reliable map and routing data, in order for us to dispatch our service staff, especially given the large number of informal roads in this region,” said Jason Zhang, Director at Luce SG. “Amazon Location Service powered by GrabMaps has one of the most accurate maps and routing data in these geographies. With Amazon Location Service and GrabMaps powering our dispatch and routing, we are confident that we can deliver the same on-time performance in all the regions we operate, including those outside of Singapore. ”