The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Strategic decision · 2018-2025
SF Express optimized its air and ground network to save over $1B.
SF Express replaced manual network planning with OR, cutting delivery time for over a billion parcels and saving more than a billion dollars.
SF Express
the move
China's express industry has led the world in parcel volume since 2014, passing one billion parcels in 2021 — about 70% of the world's total. SF Express, the top integrated logistics provider, depended on a vast network planned manually by regional offices.
SF's operations research team built mathematical models for network planning: a multi-stage design that optimizes the air network first (including the location of a new air hub), then the ground and intra-city networks. They worked closely with business teams, starting from small cases and iterating to respect real-world constraints.
Cumulatively the tools reduced carbon emissions by millions of tonnes, saved over a billion dollars, and cut delivery time for over a billion parcels.
why it works
- Manual regional planning could not keep up with explosive parcel growth
- Designing the air hub first lets cheaper ground networks be planned to match
- Modeling cost, speed and carbon together avoids trading one for another badly
- A multi-stage approach manages the complexity of a national network
what transfers
When regional planners each optimize their own patch, the system as a whole is suboptimal; solving the network in layers reveals hub choices and routings that add up to billions.
what came after
SF Express was named a 2025 Franz Edelman Award finalist. The team published standards, patents and academic papers on green logistics and network optimization, and shared its experience by lecturing at Chinese universities and hosting competitions to attract new operations researchers.
references
- 2025 Franz Edelman Award finalist: SF Express
- Transshipment network design for express air cargo operations in China
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