Meet the winners of the Sendy Logisitics Challenge

Logistics in Sub-Saharan Africa increases the cost of manufactured goods by up to 320%; while in Europe, it only accounts for up to 90% of the manufacturing cost.

Economies are better when logistics is efficient and affordable.

Sendy, in partnership with insight2impact facility, is hosting a Zindi challenge to predict the estimated time of delivery of orders, from the point of driver pickup to the point of arrival at final destination.

The solution will help Sendy enhance customer communication and improve the reliability of its service; which will ultimately improve customer experience. In addition, the solution will enable Sendy to realise cost savings, and ultimately reduce the cost of doing business, through improved resource management and planning for order scheduling.

Sendy helps men and women behind every type of business to trade easily, deliver more competitively, and build extraordinary businesses.

“We believe in them; we believe that logistics should be an enabler for them to achieve their goals, rather than a hindrance. We believe that everyone should be able to participate and thrive in the economy and that no small business should be left out because the cost of logistics is either too high or inaccessible.”

Data is a critical component in helping Sendy to build more efficient, affordable and accessible solutions. Given the details of a Sendy order, can we use historic data to predict an accurate time for the arrival of the rider at the destination of a package? In this competition, we’re challenging you to build a model that predicts an accurate delivery time, from picking up a package to arriving at the final destination. An accurate arrival time prediction will help all businesses to improve their logistics and communicate an accurate time to their customers.

This competition is being hosted by Sendy and insight2impact.

About Sendy(sendyit.com):

Sendy is a business-to-business platform established in 2014, to enable businesses of all types and sizes to transport goods more efficiently across East Africa.

The company is headquartered in Kenya with a team of more than 100 staff, focused on building practical solutions for Africa’s dynamic transportation needs, from developing apps and web solutions, to providing dedicated support for goods on the move.

Currently operating in Kenya and Uganda, Sendy is expanding to Nigeria and Tanzania, to enable thousands more businesses to move volumes of goods easily, anywhere, at any time. Sendy aggregates a pool of delivery options from 28 ton, 14 ton, 5 ton trucks to pick up trucks, vans and motorcycles.

“At Sendy, we’re on a mission to change the lives of everyone we touch; from patients who rely on regular medicine at the local pharmacy to farmers who urgently need to move their produce to silos, we are offering a service that African companies can depend on. We are building a platform to tackle logistic challenges that business across Africa face on a day to day basis.”

About insight2impact(i2ifacility.org):

insight2impact (i2i) is a resource centre supporting the use of data for decision-making, with a focus on financial and economic inclusion. i2i is hosted by FinMark Trust and Cenfri and funded by the Gates Foundation in partnership with The Mastercard Foundation.

Teams and collaboration

You may participate in this competition as an individual or in a team of up to four people. When creating a team, the team must have a total submission count less than or equal to the maximum allowable submissions as of the formation date. A team will be allowed the maximum number of submissions for the competition, minus the highest number of submissions among team members at team formation. Prizes are transferred only to the individual players or to the team leader.

Multiple accounts per user are not permitted, and neither is collaboration or membership across multiple teams. Individuals and their submissions originating from multiple accounts will be disqualified.

Code must not be shared privately outside of a team. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform. (i.e. on the discussion boards).

Datasets and packages

The solution must use publicly-available, open-source packages only. Your models should not use any of the metadata provided.

You may use only the datasets provided for this competition.

The data used in this competition is the sole property of Zindi and the competition host. You may not transmit, duplicate, publish, redistribute or otherwise provide or make available any competition data to any party not participating in the Competition (this includes uploading the data to any public site such as Kaggle or GitHub). You may upload, store and work with the data on any cloud platform such as Google Colab, AWS or similar, as long as 1) the data remains private and 2) doing so does not contravene Zindi’s rules of use.

You must notify Zindi immediately upon learning of any unauthorised transmission of or unauthorised access to the competition data, and work with Zindi to rectify any unauthorised transmission or access.

Your solution must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.

Submissions and winning

You may make a maximum of 10 submissions per day. Your highest-scoring solution on the private leaderboard at the end of the competition will be the one by which you are judged.

As the challenge has now closed, the maximum number of submissions per day is 30.

Zindi maintains a public leaderboard and a private leaderboard for each competition. The Public Leaderboard includes approximately 20% of the test dataset. While the competition is open, the Public Leaderboard will rank the submitted solutions by the accuracy score they achieve. Upon close of the competition, the Private Leaderboard, which covers 100% of the test dataset, will be made public and will constitute the final ranking for the competition.

If you are in the top 20 at the time the leaderboard closes, we will email you to request your code. On receipt of email, you will have 48 hours to respond and submit your code following the submission guidelines detailed below. Failure to respond will result in disqualification.

If your solution places 1st, 2nd, or 3rd on the final leaderboard, you will be required to submit your winning solution code to us for verification, and you thereby agree to assign all worldwide rights of copyright in and to such winning solution to Zindi.

If two solutions earn identical scores on the leaderboard, the tiebreaker will be the date and time in which the submission was made (the earlier solution will win).

The winners will be paid via bank transfer, PayPal, or other international money transfer platform. International transfer fees will be deducted from the total prize amount, unless the prize money is under $500, in which case the international transfer fees will be covered by Zindi. In all cases, the winners are responsible for any other fees applied by their own bank or other institution for receiving the prize money. All taxes imposed on prizes are the sole responsibility of the winners.

You acknowledge and agree that Zindi may, without any obligation to do so, remove or disqualify an individual, team, or account if Zindi believes that such individual, team, or account is in violation of these rules. Entry into this competition constitutes your acceptance of these official competition rules.

Please refer to the FAQs and Terms of Use for additional rules that may apply to this competition. We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

Reproducibility

• If your submitted code does not reproduce your score on the leaderboard, we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the score generated by the code you submitted.
• If your code does not run you will be dropped from the top 10. Please make sure your code runs before submitting your solution.
• Always set the seed. Rerunning your model should always place you at the same position on the leaderboard. When running your solution, if randomness shifts you down the leaderboard we reserve the right to adjust your rank to the closest score that your submission reproduces.
• We expect full documentation. This includes:

- All data used

- Output data and where they are stored

- Explanation of features used

- Your solution must include the original data provided by Zindi and validated external data (no processed data)

- All editing of data must be done in a notebook (i.e. not manually in Excel)

Data standards:

• Your submitted code must run on the original train, test, and other datasets provided.
• If external data is allowed it must not exceed 1 GB. External data must be freely and publicly available, including pre-trained models with standard libraries. If external data is allowed, any data used should be shared on the discussion forum.
• Packages:

- You must use the most recent versions of packages. Custom packages in your submission notebook will not be accepted.

- You may only use tools available to everyone i.e. no paid services or free trials that require a credit card.

Consequences of breaking any rules of the competition or submission guidelines:

• First offence: No prizes or points for 6 months. If you are caught cheating all individuals involved in cheating will be disqualified from the challenge(s) you were caught in and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months.
• Second offence: Banned from the platform. If you are caught for a second time your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points using any other account.

Monitoring of submissions

• We will review the top 20 solutions of every competition when the competition ends.
• We reserve the right to request code from any user at any time during a challenge. You will have 24 hours to submit your code following the rules for code review (see above).
• If you do not submit your code within 24 hours you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points for the next six months. If you fall under suspicion again and your code is requested and you fail to submit your code within 24 hours, your Zindi account will be disabled and you will be disqualified from winning any competitions or Zindi points.

Further updates and rulings of note:

• Multiple accounts per user, collaboration or membership across multiple teams are not allowed.
• Code may not be shared privately. Any code that is shared, must be made available to all competition participants through the platform.
• Solutions must use publicly-available, open-source packages only, and all packages must be the most updated versions.
• Solutions must not infringe the rights of any third party and you must be legally entitled to assign ownership of all rights of copyright in and to the winning solution code to Zindi.
• You will be disqualified if you do not respond within the timeframe given in the request for code.

We reserve the right to update these rules at any time.

The error metric for this competition is the Root Mean Squared Error

For every row in the dataset, submission files should contain 2 columns: order_id and Time from Pickup to Arrival (Predicted time in seconds between arrival and Pickup).

Your submission file should look like this:

Order_No                Time from Pickup to Arrival
Order_No_19248          197
Order_No_12736          7533
Order_No_768            768

1st Place: $3 500 USD + a 1 Year license for ArcGIS (a value of $250 USD)

2nd Place: $2 500 USD + a 1 Year license for ArcGIS (a value of $250 USD)

3rd Place: $1 000 USD + a 1 Year license for ArcGIS (a value of $250 USD)

Each of the top 3 winners will receive a 1 Year license for ArcGIS for Personal Use – full details here.

Competition closes on 25 November 2019.

Final submissions must be received by 11:59 PM GMT.

We reserve the right to update the contest timeline if necessary.