Julian Pachon – Large Scale Last Mile Operations: Trends, Challenges, Opportunities and Innovation

Julian Pachon - Large Scale Last Mile Operations: Trends, Challenges, Opportunities and Innovation

Abstract: Last Mile Delivery is the movement of good from a retailer’s transportation hub to its final destination – a business or consumer’s home. The rapid growth of e-commerce has elevated the role of the Last Mile. First, the number of packages that are delivered on a daily basis has increased at double digit rates over the past few years, requiring that the science and technology is able to scale fast. Second, innovation, which was once seen just as a way of driving down the cost of delivery, is now viewed as an opportunity to make more aggressive delivery offerings to compete or surpass the competitors. We will highlight fundamental changes in retail that have impacted Last Mile and discuss the cornerstones and key science-based decisions of an efficient and scalable last mile operation.

Biography: Julian Pachon

Julian Pachon is the Last Mile Chief Scientist at Amazon. He leads a team of researchers and product managers that design and build the decision support systems used to run Amazon Last Mile Worldwide Operations. Julian holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota (Colombia), MS in Industrial Engineering from Universidad de los Andes, Bogota (Colombia), and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from University of Miami.

Julian started his career as a professor teaching optimization, probability, stochastic processes and statistics at the Universidad de los Andes. After finishing his Ph.D., he joint Caleb Technologies – a company focused on building optimization systems for aviation. While in Caleb, he traveled around world implementing these technologies on carriers of all types and sizes in all five continents. Furthermore, he led the team that won the prestigious Edelman Prize (aka Nobel Prize for Optimization) based on the irregular operations technology that was used by Continental Airlines to recovery from September-11 disruption (the largest disruption in the history of aviation). Prior to joining Amazon, Julian spent 8 years leading all the Operations and Optimization technology for United Airlines. He was in charge of leading the largest merger in the aviation industry, including the build-out of a state-of-the-art command center at the famous Willis tower in Chicago.