Bocconi Students for Sustainable Finance has had the opportunity to start a collaboration with the VGen Mi team, a student association that aims at realizing researches in different sectors and sharing them with startups and innovators.

Some members of the two associations had the chance to interview Eglis Mella, one of the three young co-founders of ERMES-X, a startup operating in the field of sustainable logistics. He has presented the history and the various steps undertaken so far by the startup – across difficulties and opportunities – offering us a broad overview of the sector.

Starting from this interview, we have decided to pose ourselves three challenges that have been tackled by three different teams. The three challenges are:

1. Reorganization of the management of Milan ambulances: starting from the disposition model that has been adopted by the city of Boston, after having worked with the head of the Milan Red Cross in order to understand how the organization of vehicles and routes currently works in Milan, we thought of proposing the employment of the Ermes-x software to optimize the disposition of ambulances according to a demographic analysis of the citizens.
2. Delivery: the delivery business is certainly growing rapidly in Milan, in particular due to the pandemic we are going through. Just eat, the online meal ordering and delivery service, which play the role of an intermediary between restaurateurs and customers, has chosen to change the business model it has been using so far, hiring riders with a regular contract and a hourly fixed pay. The analysis will try to understand the rationale behind this choice and how the Ermes-x software would allow the optimization of the movements of riders.
3. Waste collection: this analysis, on the other hand, deals with the waste collection model employed in Modena (collection with bins rather than door to door, municipal incinerator management, etc.) by Hera group. The goal is to understand through a cost-benefit analysis how this activity can be optimized with the software, minimizing the socio-environmental impact.

Stay tuned for the next publications!