Chief Data Officer / China
Three times a careful answer cost us something
- Freight carried in 2025
- 8.6m t
- Less-than-truckload consignments through 58 transfer hubs
- Network revenue
- RMB7.4bn
- Calendar 2025; founder-majority private company
- Data colleagues
- 128
- Engineering, optimisation, data protection and emissions reporting
Decisions & consequences
01Measuring freight at fourteen hubs before a model removed departures
Early in 2023 my analytics team completed a load-consolidation model for 38 trunk lines leaving Zhengzhou and two other hubs. It recommended combining partial loads and cancelling 9 per cent of scheduled trailer departures, worth about RMB41 million a year. Its volume inputs were the cubic metres our outlets declared at collection. When we measured 2,400 consignments by hand at Zhengzhou, light and bulky freight such as furniture and boxed appliances was understated by an average of 11 per cent. A plan built on those declarations would book trailers that could not close, and the cost would appear as freight left on the dock and late deliveries.
Suwen Lou, our vice-president for linehaul, wanted the model on every line before the November peak. His argument was reasonable: the savings were real on paper, and dispatchers could absorb errors. I recommended a six-line pilot, dimensioning scanners at fourteen hubs costing RMB18.5 million, and a dispatcher override with the reason recorded. The chief executive accepted my proposal. We gave up the peak-season saving, roughly seven months of the projected benefit.
Measurement had a commercial side we had underestimated. Chargeable volume rose for about 3 per cent of shipper accounts once scans replaced declarations. We showed those customers their scans but billed at the declared figure for ninety days, absorbing about RMB6.3 million.
By mid-2024 the retrained model had removed 5.4 per cent of departures on the 38 lines, not 9 per cent. Average trailer fill by volume rose from 78 to 84 per cent, freight left behind at Zhengzhou fell by about a third, and the measured annual saving was RMB22.6 million. Dispatchers overrode 7 per cent of recommendations, mostly for weather and road closures.
Every model output now states which inputs were measured and which declared. Next time I would measure a sample before building the model, and I would involve the commercial team before the first scanner went live, not after the first disputed invoice.
Taking drivers' identity documents off outlet phones
Our franchised outlets contract local pickup drivers and van owners. In 2023 our personal-information inventory found that 412 of 1,710 franchised outlets kept photographs of drivers' identity cards, driving licences and bank cards in phone albums, chat groups and spreadsheets. About 27,000 people were affected, many of whom no longer worked with us. Several outlets also shared an informal list of drivers barred after cargo losses, with no recorded reason and no way for a driver to respond. Financial account details are sensitive personal information under Chinese law, and a leak from a single phone would have been our failure as much as the outlet's.
I proposed a central verification desk. Drivers would submit documents once, through our application, with separate consent; outlets would see a verification status and a masked number; payment details would sit with finance. Outlets would delete local copies and attest to it. The barring list would become a recorded decision with a reason, a twelve-month review and a route for the driver to answer.
Pingyue Dai, who chairs our franchise council, objected that onboarding would slow in the busiest weeks. Operations wanted the barring list kept as it was. Both concerns were fair. We gave up same-day onboarding, because verification could take two working days, and the company funded the desk at RMB3.2 million a year rather than charge outlets for it.
Within six months, 17,400 active driver records were verified centrally and 9,600 stale records were deleted. 397 of the 412 outlets attested deletion; the other fifteen received formal notices, and three agreements were not renewed. Of 640 names on the barring list, 212 were removed because nobody could document a reason. During the 2024 peak, slower onboarding meant about 1,100 consignments missed their collection window over two weeks.
I would bring the franchise council in at the design stage next time, and run a verification drive in September so that peak recruitment does not meet a new process for the first time.
Sending a shipper's control tower events rather than consignees' details
In 2025 a European household-appliance maker invited tenders for its China outbound distribution, a three-year contract worth about RMB260 million. One condition was a shipment-level feed to its global control tower, hosted outside China, including consignees' names, telephone numbers and full delivery addresses. The maker wanted them for failed-delivery follow-up and analytics. The volume exceeded 400,000 home deliveries a year.
Sending personal information abroad on that scale would have required a lawful basis and, depending on volumes and type, a security assessment, a filed standard contract or certification. Yiqiao Fan, our head of legal and data protection, did not consider that a control tower's analytics fitted comfortably within the exemptions available for performing a contract with the individual. Our commercial director wanted to accept the condition and resolve compliance after award; we understood another bidder had agreed to it.
I proposed a different feed: milestones, city-level location, timestamps and exception codes, keyed by shipment reference and delivered within fifteen minutes. Consignee fields would remain in China, visible to the maker's China entity through an onshore portal. We did not claim our design was the only lawful one. We said it was the one we could operate and defend.
The maker awarded us its central and western regions, about RMB150 million over three years. The coastal regions went to another carrier. In the first year, 98 per cent of milestone events reached the control tower within fifteen minutes, and the maker's China team handled failed deliveries through the portal.
The tender gave us a field catalogue that every cross-border request now passes through, with each field classed as exportable, exportable after review or onshore only. I would act differently on one point. I learnt the purpose of each field from the maker's privacy team only after the award; procurement had simply copied a global template. Had I asked them during the tender, a masked telephone relay might have kept the coastal regions in play.