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It's a Small World, Literally!
May 7, 2021By:
Who says restaurants only ship food and ingredients? There is immense opportunity for fast-food chains to improve speed and efficiency in managing their non-food delivery. Here’s how.
Not so long ago, there was a time when ordering-in was only available for Pizza. When a family wanted to order food and stay in, they all had to order from the same place, and the portion sizes were often designed accordingly. In the last ten years, though, a lot has changed. With the arrival of restaurant aggregators and online ordering platforms, fast-food chains think of home delivery as a growing channel — so much so that there are several ‘cloud kitchens’ that do only delivery. For the same meal, a family has the luxury of ordering from multiple places without a significant impact on the total expenses.
The market growth reflects this Experts project that the fast-food market, also known as the quick service restaurants market, will grow at a CAGR of 18% in the next five years. Much of this growth is expected to come from “increasing urbanisation, rapid expansion in food delivery services, expanding young & working population, a growing number of dual-income families and rising disposable income in the country.”
As markets grow, competition grows too. To stay competitive in the market, fast-food chains follow a wide range of strategies: Marketing, promotions and offers to attract customer interest; availability on multiple food delivery platforms to expand reach; building their tech platforms — to handle orders; collaborations with multiple businesses to enable combo-offers, and expanding store footprint to cover every nook and cranny of the city.
Each of these strategies brings two distinct challenges to fast-food businesses:
While every restaurant focusses steadfastly on the quality of their food, the logistics of paperwork and hardware is often left behind.
It is here that an efficient, robust and centralised mailroom can make a world of difference. With a reliable logistics solution provider, you can operationalise pickups, delivery and shipping of all non-food packages across all your branches, wherever they are located.
Robust logistics for non-food delivery: Delhivery Mailroom can handle the shipping of all non-food materials such as feedback forms, contracts, promotional material, tech hardware such as iPads and touchpads, etc. between head office and local branches.
Industry-ready solution offering: Unlike a regular courier service that treats all packages as the same, Delhivery Mailroom for fast-food restaurants is a unique solution designed to meet the industry’s specific needs.
One-touch package delivery and pickup: With a technology-enabled logistics provider, your staff across branches can book pickups and delivery at their convenience. For instance, with Delhivery Mailroom, your teams can book slots from their mobile phones through our user-friendly app, anywhere, anytime.
Real-time tracking: API validated tracking ensures that you can always keep an eye on your packages.
Single-pane reporting: At any point in time, you can access a customised dashboard of all the shipping you’ve done through Delhivery — how many packages, at what price, across which locations, during which time of the year etc.
Nation-wide reach and scale: Individual restaurants no longer need to go through the hassle of finding courier services, which are often inconsistent and expensive. With Delhivery Mailroom, branches in 2,500 cities across 18,000 pin codes can have consistent service and assured delivery at affordable prices.
Flexibility of payment: Delhivery Mailroom allows online bank transfer, cloud-based payments, card payments, or even cash on delivery (COD).
The success of any fast-food restaurant might be in delivering great quality food. But the efficiency relies on back-end processes like transport and logistics. Delhivery Mailroom Delhivery Mailroom is a customised solution designed to improve the efficiencies of the fast-food restaurant industry. Powered by our in-house technology, data science capabilities and an expansive network, Delhivery Mailroom can take care of your logistics while you’re cooking up a delightful meal.
Any organisation’s mailroom is among the last places where technological innovation reaches. What’s to innovate in packing and sending parcels? Well, quite a bit, actually.
The pharmaceutical industry is driven by personal relationships, which plays a key role in building customer loyalty. Pharma representatives personally visit doctors from time-to-time, not just to sell the medicines but also to engage them and keep them prescribing their brand.
To make the most of their visits, they need:
The convenience of digital, especially in the healthcare industry, takes away from the impact of the in-person experience. For instance, when a doctor receives a PDF brochure on WhatsApp, they are likely to scroll through it once and forget all about it. On the other hand, when they receive a printed brochure in hand, they are more likely to spend time reading it and absorbing the information.
In fact, unless they throw it out, it also has great recall value every time the doctor passes by it in their office. This is true of sample kits as well — there is no digital sample of medication. At least not yet.
Physical collateral defines customer experience, recall and therefore loyalty. Yet, the logistics of reaching these to the medical representatives and eventually doctors hasn’t seen much innovation for the digital age.
Multiple delivery partners: Typically, pharma logistics is conducted through multiple delivery partners to send packages because no single provider offers nation-wide reach. This causes them to interact with multiple vendors, track using multiple systems, inconsistency of delivery speeds, overall making the mailroom process tedious.
Legacy tracking systems: Most logistics companies use a traditional track and trace system that is not user-friendly. This becomes especially convoluted when you need to track hundreds of packages at once.
Insufficient reporting: Very often, the burden of reporting itself is with the client. Pharma companies have operations executives maintaining spreadsheets of packages in transit. This is a waste of time and energy. Without a clear accountability matrix, this can also lead to undelivered or lost-in-transit packages.
Delhivery’s Mailroom service brings the robust capabilities of e-commerce logistics to your organisation’s mailroom. It is powered by our in-house technology, data science capabilities and an expansive network covering 18000+ pin codes in 2500+ cities in India.
Delhivery takes your packages to the country’s nooks and crannies, becoming your singular logistics solutions provider.
With Delhivery Mailroom, booking pickups, returns, rescheduling etc., are at your fingertips through the mobile app.
Delhivery’s user-friendly tracking system offers detailed real-time visibility into your entire organisation’s logistics. These reports are automated, significantly reducing manual work for your operations teams.
Delhivery Mailroom understands that not all deliveries are the same. This is why we’ve created custom solutions for the pharma industry, keeping in mind your privacy, security, and delivery assurance needs. With e-commerce grade logistics and data science capabilities, your mailroom gets a much-needed boost of technology innovation and automation.
When the entire country went into lockdown, when shops were shut and businesses were temporarily closed, everyone turned to e-commerce. But there was one problem: Even e-commerce delivery was prohibited in many localities. Containment zones — areas with heavy COVID-19 caseload — were cordoned off, preventing delivery personnel from entering.
For sellers, this resulted in several challenges:
Loss of revenue: As deliveries could not be completed, sellers faced a sharp increase in returns and cancellations. This resulted in a significant loss of opportunity for many players.
Operational inefficiency: Cancelling, returning, rescheduling and delayed deliveries took a toll on the operational efficiencies built by sellers and logistics companies. A lot of time and labour was lost in these activities.
Dissatisfied customers: While most customers understood the unprecedented situation, they were also disappointed that they couldn’t get the product they wanted and paid for. More importantly, they were dissatisfied that e-commerce companies couldn’t inform them in advance whether the product can be delivered or not.
Until the pandemic was overcome, e-commerce players had no way to prevent this situation. It is here that Delhivery leveraged machine learning technologies to identify whether a locality is a containment zone or not and enable express delivery.
Addfix is a proprietary address disambiguation service that leverages machine learning techniques to convert addresses into a consumable form.
Post that, it helps you confirm mobility in delivery destinations by verifying if the customer's address falls in a containment zone.
Optimising revenue opportunities: By identifying the localities that cannot be delivered to, AddFix helped sellers focus on customers who they can serve. This way, their efforts were redirected to areas where express delivery was possible, and revenue opportunities were higher.
Increased productivity: Addfix provided clear visibility on the delivery situation. As a result, sellers were able to decline orders even before payment, reducing the pressure on logistics staff significantly.
Improved efficiency: AddFix helps reduce returns and cancellations, saving logistics costs. It also helped save time and energy of the logistics staff, enhancing their efficiency.
Satisfied customers: No failed orders, no disgruntled customers. Sellers were able to inform customers even before placing the order that it cannot be delivered. This encouraged them to return and check again later.
Address disambiguation can play a transformative role in e-commerce delivery in India. Converting addresses into latitude and longitude coordinates — using geocoding — has many benefits. Each house can be easily placed on a map for the delivery personnel to navigate effortlessly. This reduces the number of phone calls that the delivery personnel need to make to the customer. Real-time tracking is possible, giving better visibility to the customer.
With the geocoding coordinates, e-commerce logistics companies can also identify accurately whether they can deliver to a locality or not. This can come in handy during natural disasters like the pandemic or floods and during special situations like elections, dry days, regional holidays, etc.
Banking may have gone digital, but not all banks entirely have. Even today, a lot of work in the banking and financial institutions industry happens through paper. Document shipping is necessary to send welcome kits, credit cards, PINs, fixed deposit receipts to the customer; marketing and promotional material to the branches; bills, receipts, contracts etc., to the head office; processed documents to the archives etc.
For all of this, today, banks use logistics or courier companies. This comes with several unique challenges of security, traceability, cost, reach etc. In this blog post, we explore what banks want from their logistics partners.
Much of the documents that are sent from or to the bank are confidential. Any logistics partner needs to have the capabilities to carry and deliver secure packages. This itself eliminates a lot of the smaller players.
At Delhivery, we have dedicated stations for sorting and bagging banking shipments to guarantee safe document shipping. We use polybags to protects the aesthetics of bank shipments. We also enable express delivery of sensitive documents.
Banks and financial institutions can’t simply resend their packages if they get lost in transit. There is confidential information that has the potential to be misused. So, it is fundamental that the packages can be tracked at all time. Many smaller players can’t offer this, making them unviable.
Delhivery’s API-validated real-time tracking system ensures that you can track your packages from the convenience of your mobile phone.
Most logistics providers only deliver to cities or, at best, some towns. Therefore, different branches end up using different courier services. This affects the consistency of service as well as pricing, timeliness etc.
We can support express delivery across 18000+ pin codes in the country, giving you and your customer a consistently delightful service.
To ensure that the packages are securely delivered to the customer, banks end up choosing multi-national logistics companies, who charge a hefty premium. This burns a hole in the budget.
Delhivery’s competitive offerings ensure that businesses can ship packages at scale at affordable prices.
Banks aren’t open all day, every day. Packages need to be delivered while the branch or the head office is open. If such a delivery isn’t possible, the logistics provider needs to have an intelligent way to reschedule deliveries instead of just going back to the branch at 6 pm each day!
Our express logistics offer slotted branch deliveries between 10 am and 1 pm on working days and reschedule for bank holidays. We also allow OTP/IVR-based cancellation and rescheduling for deliveries.
For most logistics companies, a customer is a customer whether they’re a bank or a bakery. This means that they don’t understand the unique needs and challenges that come with the financial services industry.
Delhivery’s BFSI solution is designed, keeping your precise needs in mind. It includes confirmed express delivery of confidential documents — using SMS confirmation for secure product delivery, OTP-based authorisation, address verification, dual address capability etc., customised for the BFSI industry.
Delhivery BFSI brings together our partner transportation service Express and bulk shipment processing service Mailroom to meet the needs of the financial services industry. Delhivery BFSI also facilitates same-day delivery and 1-3 day delivery in major locations and dedicated sorting and bagging of BFSI shipments with utmost care.
When international brands come to India, and sell only through e-commerce, imports, warehousing and delivery of goods can be complex. Delhivery Cross-Border simplifies that.
The growing Indian middle class, their increasing disposable income, and the increased share of women in the workforce have made India a big fashion market — the sixth largest globally. Add to it the deeper internet penetration and 4G access in the last few years, India is second only to China in its online market size. This makes the country an attractive target for international fashion brands.
And we’re able to see the change — in 2019, McKinsey projected that over 300 foreign brands are poised to enter the country in two years. While the pandemic may have put a stick in those plans, global brands are entering the Indian market through e-commerce. This can either be online marketplaces or their online store, both on the web and through mobile apps.
As e-commerce drives the growth of international fashion brands entering India, they are likely to encounter logistics complexities.
Today, the import of goods for fashion retail happens in the B2B2C model. In the B2B phase, an importer on record imports the goods does the customs clearance and stocks it in a warehouse. In the B2C phase, the local importer ships the goods to end consumers who have placed the order online.
Depending on the kind of goods sold and their value, brands choose either the just-in-time (JIT) process, where the products are shipped from overseas after the consumer places the order; or import-and-stock model where a local representative imports the products in advance, based on demand predictions.
While fashion brands choose just-in-time delivery of goods, they face a bunch of challenges:
An end-to-end supply chain services company like Delhivery can help brands overcome these challenges and optimise their logistics efficiencies.
First-mile pickup: From China, including customs clearance.
Warehouse management: Bringing parcels to warehouses for inventory management and relabelling.
Freight management: Air freight to India and managing destination clearance on arrival.
Last-mile delivery: Taking products to the end-customer in India.
On the other hand, when brands can predict demand — whether it’s in individual locations in the country or based on events such as festivals, sales etc. — it is often more cost-effective to import in bulk. However, it so happens that sometimes, there is no confirmed space in air freight, forcing them to choose ocean freight, which is slower.
Delhivery’s end-to-end supply chain services are designed to help brands overcome these challenges. Through our partnership in Starfleet, we ensure that there is confirmed space available for our clients on air freight. We also offer guaranteed upliftment for clients in China.
Choosing between just-in-time orders and B2B orders is a decision typically of the amount of data an organisation has. In the first few months of entering a new market like India, brands might not have the data to predict demand. As a result, going the B2B way might lead to too much or too little stock, causing supply chain inefficiencies.
So, brands typically start with just-in-time delivery through an international freight forwarder to identify demand areas across product-mix, key consumption categories and the choice of customers. Once some level of predictability is achieved, they import in larger quantities and stock effectively.
Delhivery Cross-Border, our global logistics services, can help international brands, whatever model they choose. It uses Starfleet — a global alliance of leading logistics providers and a network of clearance agents and forwarders — to ensure delivery. Delhivery can handle the end-to-end process efficiently and effectively, from first-mile pickup to last-mile delivery in India.
Gadgets are a dime a dozen. What can international electronics brands do to ensure their products reach the customer on time every time?
For global tech brands, the rise of digital India promises great opportunities. From foldable smartphones to smart home accessories, high-end tech to everyday consumer electronics, the gadgets market sees huge technological advancements — India Experts demand for electronic products to reach $400 billion by 2023-24.
While the possibilities are exciting, the space is also notorious for being competitive. In e-commerce, this competition is especially intense. In multi-brand online retail, the customer has hundreds of options — if any product is not in stock, they simply move over to the next one.
One of the important ways in which electronics brands stay competitive is by making their products always available. But being always available isn’t easy: It needs robust demand forecasting capabilities.
New brands entering the Indian market often lack the data needed to make complex demand forecasts. It is here that a good tech-enabled logistics services partner can help.
When a customer in India places an order for a gadget online, the brand typically fulfils it through a local partner/stockist. In the early stages of market entry, brands make assumptions around potential demand and stock goods with the local partner/stockist. These assumptions don’t hold true more often than not, leading to losses due to overstocking or missed opportunities due to understocking.
It is for situations like this that Delhivery recommends just-in-time delivery through an air freight forwarder. Brands can ship products to customers after they place the order, responding perfectly to demand. Choosing airfreight reduces time-to-market, ensuring immediate availability, even during sales and promotions. Delhivery ensures guaranteed upliftment from China and confirmed space availability on the freight.
With just in time delivery:
Based on the orders placed, products shipped, freight charges etc. over a period of time, brands can observe demand patterns. Not just total demand over time, but also a clear understanding of the product mix, top-selling products, location of demand, optimum price point etc. This data can then be used to optimise operations and logistics.
Electronics is one of the fastest-growing sectors in Indian retail, more so in e-commerce. New products are being launched each day. International brands need to compete not just with other global brands, but also made in India brands, which are delivering top quality at affordable prices. One of their biggest strengths is that they’re available for the customer when they need it.
Global electronics brands who are looking to enter the Indian market need their products to be ‘always available’. We believe that data-driven demand forecasting plays a fundamental role in making that happen. To forecast demand and optimise operations, you need more than just a global shipping services company. You need a supply chain services company that has advanced data science, engineering and technology capabilities to solve business problems.
Read more about how we set up a fast and feasible B2B supply chain for a global headphone brand here.
An important part of e-commerce success is fulfilment. No amount of technology — world-class website, user-friendly ordering app, savvy email marketing or even a large catalogue — can get customer delight if you can’t deliver the product on time in full.
Inefficiency in E-Commerce Fulfilment often leads to:
All of the above problems can be overcome with a single solution: A robust 4-pronged approach to order fulfilment.
The first step towards operational efficiency is inventory management. You need a warehouse management system that enables you to manage your stock and process shipping efficiently. Make sure it enables a robust strategy for location management, picking and putaway, inventory and batch management. This will help store your inventory in an easily accessible and reachable manner.
Also, look for a WMS with a multi-product shipment function, with the ability to ship multiple child SKUs as one shipment. This will prevent incomplete shipments from going out.
Not all fulfilment centres are the same. Depending on the product you’re selling, you need a fulfilment centre that’s designed for you. For instance, a client of ours in the business of selling furniture needed a fulfilment centre with pallet racking, load unit/best-fit evaluation and finalisation. Given the size of their products, they also needed a furniture warehouse with a customised layout to make the maximum use of storage space. We enabled this for them.
Moreover, while choosing a fulfilment centre, remember to ensure that it can be managed through your chosen WMS.
Returns are inevitable. You can minimise them but never eliminate them completely. The best you can do is process returns efficiently and address complaints on time. A good fulfilment process should enable this for you.
Customers today are used to real-time tracking of their delivery — be it their food or their new sofa set. Real-time tracking gives customers the information they seek on-demand, significantly reducing customer service enquiries.
On the other hand, it also gives you clearly and timely visibility into your orders’ status, even when handled by a logistics partners. It allows you to control the customer experience, taking proactive steps in case of delays.
It is these four pillars that Delhivery’s Fulfilment offerings rest on. We operate 85 fulfilment centres across India, with over 6 million sq. feet of storage and processing space.
Rajiv Dinesh
At the turn of the millennium, large incumbent logistics companies were basking in the success of a tried and tested formula. It included scaling to reduce costs and putting in place rigid operating procedures to ensure service quality. They relied on deep integrations with large corporations or heavy-touch engagements with individual consumers to ensure the correct information is collected to operate their networks as planned. Inefficiencies in the system were offset by the economies of scale.
However, the playbook has now begun to change. With the increasingly pervasive presence of mobile and internet technology, and the sustained exponential growth of the ecommerce sector, logistics companies need to effectively and efficiently deal with multiple ecosystem stakeholders to ensure success. These include
This demands an ecosystem designed for collaboration, flexibility, adaptability, and responsiveness to emergent circumstances. In the past, this may have been a pipe dream requiring the cloning of the smartest, most knowledgeable and dynamic of operators, salespeople and delivery executives.
Today, however, the power of AI/ML and big data has turned this vision into tangible reality as it continues to shape the industry under the leadership of a new generation of tech-centric logistics companies.
At Delhivery, we recognised early on the need for setting into motion a virtuous cycle that takes the data generated at scale, converts it into ecosystem intelligence, and provides strategic guidance for optimizing on-ground operations. The goal? Improving service quality and delivery success while enhancing the economies of scale in a manner not accessible to the traditional SOP- and asset ownership-driven operators.
Against this backdrop, here’s looking at the key components of the AI-ML/big data stack of the future:
New-age logistics companies aim to become smarter and more effective with every transaction in their system. How? By harnessing huge amounts of data to extract actionable insights. The AI platform at Delhivery, for instance, ingests, assimilates and learns from over 1 billion system actions, 30 million user addresses (in conjunction with delivery coordinates), 4 billion vehicle GPS tracepoints, and 2,700 TB of computer vision data.
This data is gathered via GPS, IoT, cameras, and internet-connected devices, over a month. We then leverage it to build intelligence involving addresses, products, customer behaviour, vehicular movement, utilization, and operations in our facilities.
To grow rapidly, an organisation needs to be able to update its network design with the changing trends of the demand and supply landscape. This process includes changing the location and the capacity of facilities; determining which facilities service which locations; deciding which warehouses to store products in; manpower required at different locations; onboarding variable supply such as delivery partners/ stores/ facilities/ fleets; changing the capacity, frequency, and connections of vehicles moving in the network, etc.
AI/ML-driven network optimisation engines leverage historic intelligence in conjunction with emergent trends and can accurately predict the performance of different network configurations. This helps to upgrade and maintain the most optimal network design over short cycles of time.
Self-driving vehicles and completely automated warehouses have become more than mere buzzwords today. As these technologies continue to mature, the scope of optimising the lifecycle of each shipment in the network will expand. Once you have a network primed to deliver success for the present demand, there are multiple decisions to make for an individual package: where it gets picked up from? Who picks it up, and along with what other shipments? What route does it move through in the network? At what time does it get delivered? These decisions, in turn, contribute heavily to the golden metrics of cost and service quality. Instead of rigid, static mechanisms to drive these activities, we rely on intelligent system direction that accounts for the current state of the network and provides the optimal guidance, all the while learning from the impact of its recommendations.
Let us follow the trail of a small ecommerce company. Its warehouse is in Bengaluru and, emboldened by democratised technology to take on the ecommerce bigwigs, it is currently involved in shipping a bottle of hair oil to a customer.
Unfortunately, due to lack of standardised processes, a lazy employee and a customer unfamiliar with ecommerce, the company provides the product description as ‘Dabur Vtika’, incorrect dimensions as ‘100cmX100cmX100cm’, weight as ‘10 kgs’ and consignee address as ‘b2 kran resdecy, gurgan’. A human who deals extensively with the company and the specific customer will know exactly what and where the company intends to ship, but a traditional logistics company may end up making very interesting errors, including miscalculating the space needed for this package, mishandling the shipment – leading to spillage of oil onto other shipments and not knowing where or by what mode to deliver this product, nor how much to bill the client.
Conversely, an AI-powered system will make sense of this unstructured information to decipher (using a deep learning-based product classifier like Delhivery’s Catfight) that the shipment comprises a hair oil product (a liquid that requires differential handling to avoid damage), and that it cannot be transported by air due to regulatory restrictions. The system predicts the weight and volume correctly based on historic knowledge of ecosystem products and the seller track record, and resolves the incomplete, misspelled address (using the Addfix address disambiguation engine) to ‘B-2, Kiran Residency, Sector 56, Gurgaon, Haryana – 122011,’ providing a geocode accurate to a few metres.
The system also predicts which facility in the recently optimised network will pick up this shipment, and which one will deliver. It can also determine that a bike, not a van, is enough to pick up the shipment based on its corrected weight and volume. The route (direct or via Mumbai, keeping in mind recent weather conditions) and specific trips (2 pm or 10 pm) taken from Bengaluru to Gurgaon will be selected depending on various factors. These include the load on the network, stress at a particular facility, connection timings, delivery deadline, and utilisation considerations. The system can also direct the operator for appropriate handling and loading of a liquid shipment to prevent damage.
Once it reaches the last mile, the slot predictor will predict the specific time that is best suited to deliver to that particular address on the given day (weekend/weekday, time of day depending on past trends and whether it is residential or commercial), and whether or not the delivery executive should carry a card machine as per the historic user preference. Finally, a dynamic route allocation and dispatching mechanism (such as Delhivery’s Flare engine) will create the optimum dispatch based on the current load and assign it to the appropriate delivery executive (on-roll agent or gig worker) based on the cost and delivery success considerations.
This is but a small glimpse of a subset of capabilities that the holy trifecta of ecosystem intelligence, adaptive network design and intelligent system direction enables modern logistic companies to deploy. It results in correct handling, minimum cost (through improved utilisation), and timely and satisfactory delivery made in the fewest attempts possible.
Democratising access to newly unlocked market segments and collaboration with ecosystem players for mutual gains are contingent on your tech capabilities. You need to be able to continuously make sense of unstructured and non-standard data, gain deep insights from the data lake, and use them to augment your operations. Finally, you need to be able to make dynamic contextual recommendations and learn from their acceptance or rejection by on-ground operators.
The future will see new-age logistics players transforming themselves into collaborative, AI-powered platforms rather than simply continuing as owners and operators of fleets and facilities. Organisations that embrace these tenets as integral to their functioning will continue to maintain a competitive edge over their peers, consolidating their leadership – technological and operational – in the market.
What do you do when millions of shipments in your nationwide logistics network, designed for speed, become ineligible for delivery with immediate effect? When the rules of what can be delivered where, are changing on a real-time basis? When your clients are unsure of how to continue their business?
As the data science and technology team of a logistics innovator, how do you support the thousands of resolute COVID warriors of the operations team, who are braving the on-ground fear and confusion, to maintain what has suddenly become a primary lifeline to supply essential goods across the country?
You roll up your sleeves, repurpose the data science muscles you`ve built over more than 700 million successful deliveries, and get to work!
This is how technology helped us go from 0 active pin codes on March 24, the beginning of the lockdown, to being fully functional across over 15000 pin codes by April 1.
When the COVID threat began spreading internationally, Delhivery was an early adopter of precautions to prevent the spread of the virus. The foresight of our leadership team resulted in work from home for our corporate staff from March 5. Strict sanitization, social distancing, protective equipment usage, and best practices for a COVID afflicted world were already in effect throughout the network. Delhivery stocked up on masks and sanitizers and distributed over a million kits to local authorities.
On March 24, the nationwide lockdown came with little warning, as cases continued to escalate rapidly. Overnight, the government issued instructions to allow movement of only essential goods, and no physical movement would be allowed without specially issued passes to providers of essential goods and services.
The scramble for curfew passes, and intense coordination with local authorities was on.
Utter confusion and worry overshadowed the Indian business ecosystem. Sellers of essential goods were ramping up supplies, while others were pivoting from extremely different businesses to cater to the needs of the day. No one knew how the future was going to pan out.
Most importantly, no one knew how the goods they sold or manufactured would reach their eventual users.
The Delhivery transportation network has been purpose-built to move goods faster than anyone else, from one place to another. At the time the lockdown hit, and non-essential goods could no longer be delivered, our immediate prerogative was to separate the goods in our network which could be shipped from those which couldn’t.
Challenge 1, accepted - Enter Catfight
Different companies shipping with us use different, unstructured, and often non-standard product codes, category codes, and descriptions for their goods.
Over the years, we have learnt to categorize the type of goods that are shipped in our network, from the point of view of security, safety, and evaluating whether a particular package can be shipped by air.
Catfight is Delhivery’s proprietary machine learning-based product categorization tool that derives category and subcategory information from an unstructured product description.
Overnight, we repurposed this ability to identify essential and non-essential goods in the network and separate the essential goods that needed to be moved, from those which needed to be set aside for the time being.
{
"data": [
{ "prd": "ayurvedic nasal drops",
"cat": "Health and Wellness",
"scat": "Pharmacy Products",
"is_esntl": true,
"res_code" : 3001
}],
"req_id": "ctf8|104 fc80-2149-4caa-9664-3cd797f"
}In the days to come, the definition of essential goods would continue to evolve as different state governments started to ease these restrictions. Our ear to the ground would help us understand which goods were being allowed to be delivered and help us keep the list of essential goods updated.
This would turn out to be a crucial ingredient for businesses to reboot in the days to come, as we would advise our clients on the goods they could ship, without fear of having their stock stuck in the logistics network.
Containment Zones were coming up across the country, in areas with high Covid incidence, with limited access allowed to people within them. Shipments to be delivered here could be delayed at the last mile as they would require the consignee to come to the access points at the edge of the containment zones to collect their shipments.
The ability to identify the shipments destined for these zones in advance, was key to managing our operations and in providing correct information to shippers and consignees.
Challenge 2, accepted - Enter AddfixAddfix is Delhivery’s proprietary address disambiguation service that leverages machine learning techniques to convert unstructured addresses into a more consumable form.
Simply put, in the absence of standardized address formats, users write the same address in many different ways, which may include alternate spellings, conflicting geographical information (e.g., two unrelated localities), or missing information (e.g., forgot to write pin code).
Over the journey of 700M+ deliveries across India, we have built the unmatched ability to convert barely intelligible user generated addresses into their meaningful structured version.
Why was this now so important? For starters, it allowed us to take different definitions of containment zones called out by state or city authorities and understand the geographical element that corresponded to the zone description. The second thing it did, was to help understand whether a particular shipment with a poorly written address (like the one in the image above) belonged to a containment zone or not.
Close on the heels of the first lockdown came the definition of red, orange, and green zones, which added further complexity to what could be shipped and made our ability to disambiguate addresses even more critical than before.
In addition, we discovered that many areas were being locked down at the discretion of the local authorities or residents with information not published anywhere. Again, our ear to the ground helped us to identify these localities with the help of reason codes provided by our field operators.
With our location intelligence engine purring gleefully in the face of the challenges on the ground, we were able to immediately turn around to create a COVID Map interface not just for our own teams, but also for our client partners and the general public.
Let’s give a sense of how quickly this transpired.
On March 24, when the lockdown was announced, Delhivery and all logistics companies in the country were operational in 0 pin codes.
Within days we had our mapping of ‘what’ could be shipped ‘where’ in place. We had our feedback loops from the ground on essential goods definition and restricted localities - to have complete visibility of the actual situation that no one else - client, consignee, competitor, or even government - was able to capture in totality.
Every shipment at every facility in our network had a Ready To Ship (Yes/No) flag based on this intelligence.
Within 7 days, Delhivery was active in 15,500+ pin codes. We had transformed the way we conducted our business in record time to meet the COVID challenge.
Challenge 3 - pwned.Our network was now moving like clockwork. The situation on the ground kept changing rapidly and without warning. The incredible resilience and ingenuity of our Ops team, combined with our ability to assimilate and integrate any new circumstances into our technology ecosystem, helped us navigate the coming days within an efficiency unmatched in the country.
However, we still had to help Indian businesses to move out of paralysis and restart their activities immediately. During this period, our business development team continued to on-board hundreds of clients across Pharma, Retail, and FMCG distributing critical supplies, and many others, left without a reliable logistics partner.
Clear visibility about the eventual fate of their shipments was the most significant piece of information that businesses needed to restart their operations.
We provided visibility to large, medium, small businesses, and individual consumers on their respective interfaces from the moment the shipment manifested to the moment it reached the consignee. This included information on the status of restrictions at the consignee address, as well as the current essential/non-essential status of what they were trying to ship.
Delhivery also externalized its categorization and location intelligence APIs. Our clients could now use our capabilities to accelerate their reboot process.
We noticed two interesting trends through the course of the close interactions of our BD teams with clients.
Many clients were not targeting business in different parts of the country as they were unaware of the on-ground situation. We also noted that many clients previously shipping essential goods had become inactive.
A quick analytic interface was set up for our BD teams to see the activity patterns by pincode and goods category for each client - large or small, and our BD team rapidly enabled businesses to ship over a million shipments, from categories and to pincodes that they were unsure about shipping.
Client activity - 1500 pin codes
With BD support - 15500+ active pin codes
The COVID threat across the world had already made the annual operating plans of every business obsolete. We went back to the drawing board to make fresh projections in the face of the inevitable economic slowdown, still setting ambitious targets for the year to come.
However, our ability to rise to the occasion - whether it was the operations resuming on-ground, or business development onboarding stranded customers, or tech and data science helping us place our next step with surety - meant that we were back in business with a bang.
A brief period of degrowth can be seen in essential goods during Lockdown 1, as businesses were focused on their ability to ship essential goods, getting permits for their operations, and our own network was completely shut down for two days.
Changing customer purchase behaviour, focused towards stocking up on food, medicine, grocery - the essentials - and our rapid enablement of movement of these goods led to a surge in essential goods movement - higher than normal periods, despite on-ground challenges.
The subsequent period of growth was fuelled by our client activation activities which included our up-to-date publishing of information on newly designated essential goods categories derived from our ground intelligence.
Non-essential goods saw the biggest period of inactivity.
The flatlining of non-essentials through lockdown 1 and 2 reveals the strict government clampdown and our guidance to clients to avoid shipping non-essential goods that could not be delivered. However, the growth of non-essential volumes remained critical for restarting the economic engine.
We can see the rebound in non-essential volumes as soon as the government introduced the concept of red/ orange/ green zones and relaxed restrictions in green and orange zones. As further relaxations were introduced, our clients were the first to be notified of what they can start shipping again, leading to steady increase in volumes, even in red zones.
By June, our volumes in this segment had left the pre-covid volumes far behind.
Crisis reveals character.
Perhaps in the lifetimes of our young team at Delhivery, never before has a crisis of this proportion been heard of, let alone encountered. We stood up to deliver, and learnt three very heartening lessons about ourselves as a team, that we had always believed, but had now witnessed, beyond doubt, through our performance in a global crisis.
There were no COVID lay-offs at Delhivery. Stable job opportunities continued to be available for both on-roll and off-roll staff. Clients had been given access to our exclusive intelligence capabilities, to restart their businesses. Our CEO and Exec leaders held daily 4 pm AMA sessions to ensure that they could assuage any team member`s anxiety about their future or the future of the company.
In the face of numerous, continuously emerging on-ground challenges, we were back on our feet faster than anyone else, closely working with every stakeholder to ensure uninterrupted shipping of essential goods to end customers at the time of their greatest need. Senior management was present in the facilities, ensuring operators had adequate safety measures and support in dealing with authorities. Tech and data teams were working around the clock for weeks to make our ground operators` lives easier.
We were able to set up new operational practices and re-purpose our core technology strengths rapidly, helping us completely refashion the way we run our business and take our clients, old and new, along, in this journey of navigating a very fluid and unpredictable ground reality.
Business Development, Client Experience, Operations and Data/Tech Product teams took initiative both individually and collectively, collaborating rapidly and iteratively, to create a constant feedback loop between ground conditions, clients and the Delhivery network.
As a team, we have learnt an important lesson about ourselves - no matter what the circumstances are - we will deliver.
(Interested in collaborating with our Data practice to improve your business? Interested in joining our Data team? Drop me a line at rd@delhivery.com)
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