We lifted first-attempt delivery
into best-in-class territory.

The Challenge

The leak was in the last mile — and invisible on the P&L.

The carrier’s first-attempt delivery rate (FADR) had slipped to 81% — meaning nearly one in five first attempts was failing. That sits at the worst end of the range Harvard Business Review reports (up to 20% of online orders miss on the first try), while the industry average runs near 93% and top-performing fleets clear 95-98%. In last-mile economics, that gap is where the money goes.

Dispatch allocated carriers by availability and cost — never by who actually completes the drop. Drivers marked stops failed that a single call could have saved. Recipients learned a parcel was “out for delivery” only after they’d left the house. The failure modes were textbook — and almost all preventable:

1. ~$17.20 per failed attempt once redelivery, customer-service inbound, and SLA penalties were tallied.
2. Climbing return-to-origin (RTO) volumes, dragging on inventory turnaround and depot throughput.
3. Invisible customer cost: nearly 7 in 10 recipients hit by a botched delivery never ordered again

The Shift

A copilot isn’t new. Pointing one at dispatch is.

Pilots have copilots. So do developers now. The idea is simple: a system that watches the whole picture, anticipates what’s coming, and recommends the next best move — while the human stays in command. Aim that at last-mile operations and the everyday math of dispatch changes.

Instead of reacting to failures after they land, the copilot reads every signal — address quality, carrier history by postcode, live ETAs, recipient behavior — and intervenes before the window is blown. The dispatcher still decides. They just decide with a co-pilot that never blinks.

The Approach

One decision layer, on the stack they already ran.

No platform to buy, no migration. Praval engineered the copilot as a layer over the carrier’s existing systems — reading their data, intervening at every decision point from intake to doorstep.

Delivered as a service

Not a product you buy. A copilot we build and run with you.

Praval doesn’t drop a tool and leave. We engineer the copilot into your environment, run it against live results, and hand it to your team — not just launch it and walk away.

The Results

The doorstep stopped being a cost center.

Within two quarters of go-live across all six depots — on the carrier’s own systems — first-attempt delivery cleared into best-in-class territory (95%+).

• Predictive forecasting: We fused sales, promotions, weather, and regional signals into daily replenishment calls — per SKU, per region.
• A conversational interface: We gave buying managers a plain-language way to ask, and get ranked, confidence-scored answers. The AI surfaces; they decide.
• AI-led slotting: We moved the top 20% of SKUs by turnover into primary pick locations — fulfillment speed up immediately.

“Praval didn’t sell us software and walk away. They embedded, built our last-mile copilot on the stack we already had, and stayed to make it stick.”