The average shipper spends 6 hours a day, 20 days a month,
coordinating deliveries. A lot of this time is spent on calls
between the receiver, transport vendor, and the driver to find out, and communicate location-based data for a few important
shipments.
Where is the shipment right now? How long will it take? Is it
going to be late, and by how long? Is the vehicle making
unnecessary stops?
Despite the ‘Information Age’ that we live in, this data is both
cumbersome to acquire/communicate, and more often than not,
inaccurate.
- What do different kinds of shippers care about, w.r.t.
location-based data?
- What metrics should a shipper consider before
choosing between different competing products?
What do Shippers care about?
At a high-level, Shippers want to reduce effort and time spent
on coordination, have data to make decisions with, and be
notified of any anomalies. Consequently, they seem to care
about the following, wrt location:
-
Real-time notifications: Most shippers did not have
labour to spare (or care) to monitor all deliveries all the
time. Periodic push notifications to everyone who cared
would be helpful and reduce time and effort spent in coordination. Exception management could be built into
this for those shipments that were a priority.
-
Historic Location: Often, problems came up in
retrospect. Since the way shippers currently operated
was not data-based, giving them analysed historic data
on-demand would be useful. For example, a (large,
public-listed) paper manufacturer in Tamil Nadu faces
an interesting problem — their distributors in North
India collude with the drivers delivering their shipments
from TN to sell the rolls of paper en route, making 2x
the profits, and disrupting the local markets in those
routes. Worse, this was predicted to increase in the
GST-regime, where different states have differing
prices for the same commodity (since transport costs
progressively increase). Usually, this information
surfaced months later when someone reported
it. Pando solves this problem by analysing historic
location data for specific routes, and highlighting
anomalies. We go a step further to notify all parties
involved of any anomaly in real time, playing on their
fear —that information is now available. Such
historic data is valuable in claims management, bill-
settling, vendor rating, and ranking, etc. as well.
-
ETA: Loading and unloading happened at specific
times at different locations — and delays meant
demurrage borne by either party. Proactive ETA
allowed all stakeholders to plan their activities and
reduce costs.
What metric should shippers consider before choosing a
product?
-
Cost/Transaction: For the shipper, this metric is
crucial since it has a direct impact on the total logistics
cost. Often, shippers ask for a per-month/per-year cost,
which is misleading. The number of deliveries that a
product can track per unit-time vs. Cost per unit-time is
what is representative.
-
Scalability: Most industries are cyclical between
months, with Summer (end/beginning of the Financial
year) or Winter (end/beginning of the Calendar year)
being the peak/trough season. The product must work
for fluctuating deliveries perunit-time, equally
effectively. This metric has a cost component as well —
variable costs work better than fixed costs.
-
Intelligence + Accuracy: If the technology needed
additional resources to manage or was not
proactive/intelligent/customisable, the purpose (of
reducing coordination effort and time) is not achieved.
Interestingly, accuracy is not very important in long-
haul deliveries, with shippers being okay with margins
of error of up to 6–6.5 hours in ETA.
-
Resilience: Long-haul deliveries are rugged
environments. Warehouses, Factories that house
heavy machinery, fluctuating internet levels on the
highways, and very long transits without pitstops (no charging for batteries) is the reality. The product must
be resilient to such vagaries.
-
Compatibility and User-experience: Whether a
shipper dispatches one, or hundreds of consignments,
it shouldn’t matter — the user experience should be
seamless across different shipments for different
stakeholders.
Pando solves this problem by powering real-time collaboration
and information flow between all delivery stakeholders through
one digital, standardised workflow that can be monitored,
controlled, and optimised in real-time. This removes complexity
and reduces cost, time, effort, and risk. One step in this
direction is to get location-based services right.
Pando’s vision is to digitise deliveries of all kinds for
shippers of all sizes. Since 2014, we have experimented with
hundreds of software and hardware products in the market to
formulate the right combination for our clients.
To know the right combination for you,
contact us.