Workforce Planning, Delivery Certainty, and the Performance of Online Shopping Businesses: A Last-Mile Perspective from Singapore
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Abstract
Last-mile delivery performance is frequently treated in the e-commerce literature as a function of route optimisation, technology, or carrier selection, with comparatively little attention paid to the internal workforce capabilities that make those systems function. This paper draws on survey data from 56 online shopping businesses operating in the Singaporean market to examine how workforce planning, lead-time certainty, and customer-perceived delivery reliability relate to business performance. Rather than treating lead-time outcomes as a flat set of independent correlates, the paper proposes the Delivery Reliability Cascade Model (DRCM), which positions workforce planning as the upstream driver of a sequential chain running through lead-time certainty and customer-perceived reliability to business performance, with lead-time uncertainty acting as the point at which the cascade is most likely to break down. Descriptive results indicate that most surveyed businesses report close attention to lead-time reduction, improved delivery efficiency attributable to workforce planning, and a positive relationship between delivery reliability and customer perception, while also identifying lead-time uncertainty as a persistent constraint on performance. The findings are discussed in relation to existing lead-time variability and last-mile logistics literature, and the paper concludes by noting the descriptive, cross-sectional limits of the underlying data and proposing directions for research that would test the cascade logic more directly.
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