Flexibility in Home Delivery by Enabling Time Window Changes

To enhance the perceived quality of home delivery services more and more flexibility is offered to the receivers. Enabling same-day delivery, communicating predefined narrow time windows, choosing the time windows and alternative address delivery add to the receiver’s experience, making the delivery company an interesting partner for parcel-shipping companies. A new flexibility is the possibility to change the chosen or communicated time window by the receiver during the day of delivery. In this paper we investigate the effect on delivery costs of this flexibility. Receivers are allowed to change their time window until the start of the old or new (the earliest) time window. In this paper two situations are investigated: one situation where communicated time window is a result of the planning process (Time Indication) and one situation where the original time window was already chosen by the receiver (Time choice). We show that the costs rises quickly in the Time Indication case when the percentage of time window changes grow. The Time Choice case is more costly at the start, but time window changes can be handled without (too much) extra costs. However, here a higher percentage of parcels is delivered outside the time windows.