Introduction
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic constrained the entire world to their homes, e-commerce came to the rescue. All across the globe, we witnessed a rapid increase in number of sellers on platforms as well as sellers going independent to sell via their own websites. UN figures show that the impetus provided by COVID-19 to e-commerce has sustained.
This rapid rise in e-commerce activity has also led to the rise of logistics aggregators. They make it seamless for sellers to process high volumes by helping them ship their products via a host of courier companies quickly and providing them a streamlined platform to monitor orders and communication with various partners.
Well, if you’re from a logistics aggregator company, you already know how you’re saving the world so let’s just skip to the good part and talk about what we have in store for you.
Status Quo
Since the aggregators have multiple logistics providers on their platform, it becomes imperative for them to go granular into monitoring how each one of those performs in different areas over a certain time period. Most aggregators already do some analysis, but there is a major actionability issue with the way it’s done today. Let's look at the exisiting flow:
- Siloed Context: Operations teams at these aggregator companies are doing a very difficult job managing a very complex interconnected network of customers, delivery partners and much more. They turn up every morning trying to figure out their day job shuffling through a myriad number of tools; Excel, Tableau & internal dashboards for analytics, Email, Slack & WhatsApp for Messaging and Asana & Trello for tracking progress.
- Real Time Bottlenecks: It takes hours to identify problems and still leaves ops managers with no geo-context. Operations in the real world is all about location, and when the accurate context on location is lacking, it becomes difficult to solve the problem immediately and effectively. There is no way to find out in real time whenever something crucial is breaking. By the time the operations teams figure it out, it is often too late to solve it.
- Root Cause Analysis: Even when the bottlenecks are identified, root cause analysis takes weeks in time and analyst bandwidth. Multiple teams have to spend a considerable amount of time to extract data and perform analysis leading to a high turn around time.
- No Knowledge Base: There is no record kept on what different people in the ops team are working on solving, what the resolution times are, how many issues have been solved in time, recurring problems and why they keep coming back as well as the impact of everyday operational fixes.
Enter Locale, The Future of Modern Operations
The Locale.ai Blog
Locale’s control tower changes this status quo by empowering logistic aggregator platforms with real-time visibility and actionability on delivery trends.
- All the context, all the time, all in one place: Locale serves as a control tower for your whole company with all the metrics, dashboards, insights and decisions across teams in one place.
- Real Time Alerts: You can pick from a range of alert templates or set up customized triggers for any of your entity or area level metrics to get notified as to when things in your system start to break— in real-time. Each team can set alerts for KPIs that matter the most to them and can connect it to an internal tool like Clevertap to push notifications to drivers or users on their app using webhooks. More on Alerts here:
The Locale.ai Blog
- Root Cause Analysis: Locale empowers you to get to the root of problems in a matter of minutes. Our map modules significantly reduce the time and effort involved in deriving insights from data and arriving at why things are breaking.
You can analyze information at every level, right from a city or a state down to an area or even a specific order.
- Issue Tracking: Locale helps you keep track of what different people in the ops team are working on solving, what the resolution times are, how many issues have been solved in time as well as the impact of everyday operational fixes. It also helps provide historical context on recurring issues.
Now you might ask, all of that sounds great, but how would it help me and my team tangibly? Well, let's have a look.
Top Use Cases You Can Start With
Here is how Locale has helped our logistics aggregator clients improve their most cherished KPIs. You can start your Locale journey with one or more of these:
SLA Breaches
SLA breaches in logistics refer to delayed deliveries or poor service. Such breaches can adversely impact customer experience and in turn your client experience. Locale helps you identify which providers, areas, and laps of the journey cause most frequent SLA breaches. You are able to find answers to questions like:
- In which routes or areas are SLAs being breached and by how much?
- Which specific origins or destinations have high SLA breach Percentage?
- How do different courier companies or provides compare in terms of SLA breach on a specific route or in a particular area/pin code?
Return to Origin (RTO)
Returns have been one of the biggest headaches for the new-age e-commerce companies and as we have seen, high returns can even sound their death-knell by considerably increasing the costs. Your help in minimizing and predicting returns can win you the trust of your clients quickly.
Locale helps you identify areas of high returns and customer complaints and correlate them with various reasons. You are able to find out the specific drop areas with highest returns as well as the % increase in returns in these areas over a period of time. Locale sorts this data by courier companies and areas or even down to the level of delivery executives and individual customers helping you detect anomalies quickly.
It also allows you to set up a criticality alert so that when the returns in a specific area breach a pre-determined value, the Key Account Manager (KAM) gets a notification with a set of possible reasons on why it might be happening.
First Attempt Delivery Rate (FADR)
First Attempt Delivery Rate (or FADR), as the name indicates, refers to the percentage of successful deliveries made in the first attempt. Deliveries made in first attempt save costs as well as improve customer experience, metrics important for your courier partners and your clients respectively.
Locale helps you investigate areas and courier partners witnessing low FSRs and the percentage decrease over a period of time, thereby allowing you to drill down to the root causes of the same and take actions to solve for it.
Non-Delivery Rate (NDR)
Non-Delivery Rate (or NDR), as the name indicates, refers to the percentage of unsuccessful deliveries. The data on delivery % across couriers and lanes is an important metric to monitor performance. Locale helps you investigate areas with high NDR and perform root cause analysis on the same. You are able to find out the specific drop areas with highest NDRs as well as the % increase in the same there over a period of time.
Profitability
Finally, Locale helps you increase your profitability by helping you compare it on various parameters like lanes, courier partners and clients.
Conclusion
Today, Locale's No-Code control tower platform powers top companies in logistics aggregator space from all across the world. Our easy integration with workflows and highly intuitive interface helps operation managers in these companies find patterns, perform hypothesis testing and do real-time planning.
Does this sound exciting? Come, see for yourself how Locale can help transform your logistics aggregator business.
Try it yourself or Book a demo with one of our specialists to discuss use cases unique to your business.
