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By reducing unauthorised and off-contract spend leakages, companies benefit from economies of scale”

Akshay Hegde, Co-founder & MD at ShakeDeal, on how supply chains can be made agile

By reducing unauthorised and off-contract spend leakages, companies benefit from economies of scale"

1. Please brief us on ShakeDeal and its operations

Shakedeal is India’s leading, procurement focused B2B e-commerce Supply Chain Company for industrials and business supplies. ShakeDeal helps companies in streamlining supply of procurement spend and digitizing their procure-to-pay (p2p) process. With over 5 lac SKUs and over 4000 + vendors, Shakedeal is a one-stop solution for consolidated indirect procurement spend across a long tail portfolio. Shakedeal is trusted by over 200+ leading large enterprises across sectors such as Automotive, Engineering, Energy, Infrastructure, Manufacturing, FMCG, Pharma, etc.

2. How is ShakeDeal adapting to digital transformation?

Shakedeal is driving digital transformation across industries and helping streamline procure-to-pay cycles through digitalisation and transparency. This helps companies take advantage of a 4x increase in visibility across their supply chains, leading to increased efficiencies (30%) and reduced costs (5-8%). By reducing unauthorised and off-contract spend leakages, companies benefit from economies of scale and synergies across plants. Shakedeal prides itself in being a long term strategic partner for their customers by chaperoning them into the digital era of catalog buying and data driven business intelligence.

3. How is ShakeDeal digitizing procurement in India?
ShakeDeal helps companies in streamlining supply of procurement spend by digitizing their procure-to-pay (p2p) process. Shakedeal’s proprietary tech in the fields of sourcing and pricing intelligence coupled with their ability to consolidate the procurement-operations functions, enable companies to save on latent costs in the P2P cycle. The enterprise procurement suite by Shakedeal enables e-commerce like catalog buying from customised e-stores hosting negotiated, curated, and standardised catalogs. The enterprise procurement suite provides deep insights into procurement patterns and trends revealing actionable business intelligence. Through seamless integrations with ERP systems, ShakeDeal ensures a hassle free buying experience for procurement teams.

4. How can procurement help combat covid-19 in supply chain logistics?

Covid-19 pandemic has led to large scale disruption in supply chains across the world. Most companies depend on foreign supply chains – specifically those in China – because they are cost-effective. One of the biggest drawbacks of using local supply chains is pricing, and ShakeDeal realised that putting too much focus on pricing results in exposure to large-scale supply chain disruptions. The challenge going forward would be to focus on developing a more local and flexible supply chain while ensuring price competitiveness. ShakeDeal has always believed that it was important to develop local and regional supply chains to keep the disruption arbitrage in check. During the peak of the pandemic induced lockdown and even know, Shakedeal is using its existing relationships and resources to ramp up distribution and supply for covid related PPEs.

5. In your view, how is the supply chain industry adapting to the post lockdown period?

Since Unlock 1.0 there have been several gradual relaxations in movement of passengers and goods across India. Though we’ve seen sudden localised lockdowns to curtail spikes in the number of covid cases, large disruptions have significantly reduced. This has helped the economy open up and recover from supply related shocks. Several companies have taken active measures to recondition their supply chains to incorporate a more direct-to-consumer (D2C) approach. The accelerated digital adoption has also nudged several supply chains to restructure and strategize their way forward, by reducing dependence on intermediaries, so as to minimise turn around times in case of disruptions. This will definitely bode well for logistics and warehousing companies as their demand will increase in order to serve supply chains more directly with minimal disruptions.

6. What is the impact of covid on Indian manufacturing industry?

There was a large scale negative impact of covid 19 on India’s economy as it first went through a supply shock followed by a demand shock. The sudden lockdown meant a lot of industries were forced to shut their plants unless they were manufacturing for essential goods. This coupled with the massive exodus of migrant workers back to their hometowns, has led to labor related challenges across MSMEs (accounting for 33% of the manufacturing output). The abysmal drop in first quarter GDP numbers was a result of the demand shock which accompanied the lockdown. Factory output was equally affected with most of the indices reflecting negatively for the two quarters of FY21. However, September PMI data has shown a strong recovery with factory activity expanding the fastest in about eight years. This is a welcome development for an economy facing the first full year contraction in over 40 years,

7. What are ShakeDeal’s focus areas in the near future?

ShakeDeal is doubling down on its enterprise procurement play, by increasing their technology offerings and products in line with their vision of becoming an enterprise supply chain enabler. Along with their focus on improving their technology offerings, Shakedeal is expanding its footprint of Cloud and Edge fulfilment centres (CFCs and EFCs) to provide their growing customer base with superior service levels while ensuring streamlined supply for their indirect procurement. By deploying novel forms of fulfilment SVMI (Shakedeal Vendor Managed Inventory) Shakedeal is upping the ante on its claim of being India’s preferred procurement partner.