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Walmart is taking a cue from honey bees with a new data science model that carves the US into hexagonal grids designed to help make home deliveries speedier and more efficient, while also extending the offering to 12 million more households.
“What was once just out of reach is now within range, ensuring even more households have access to the essentials they rely on—delivered fast and reliably right to their doorstep,” the company wrote in a blog post.
This new geospatial platform does away with traditional boundaries such as zip codes and instead creates a series of grids or “tiles,” as Walmart described them, each of which has its own set of data points such as drive times, store capacity, and customer demand.
Walmart praised the six-sided geometric structure as uniquely efficient, saying that “unlike square or circular grids, which can create inefficiencies and leave out small areas at the edges, this system ensures that every point within a delivery zone is included.”
In addition, under the new system, customers can order deliveries from multiple Walmart stores within their grid, increasing the odds that a given product will be available.
The science behind faster deliveries: What makes hexagons so efficient? It’s a simple matter of geometry, Philip Ball wrote for the science journal Nautilus: “If you want to pack together cells that are identical in shape and size so that they fill all of a flat plane, only three regular shapes (with all sides and angles identical) will work: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons. Of these, hexagonal cells require the least total length of wall, compared with triangles or squares of the same area.”
That’s why bees use hexagons to make their honeycombs, he added, because it helps them conserve energy while making the necessary wax.
In Walmart’s case, the wax in question is the company’s growing delivery and fulfillment network, which currently includes 226 active distribution centers, according to research from supply chain consulting firm MWPVL.