Founded in 2015, with an aim to solve last Mile Deliveries Problem and to enhance customer experience globally, Locus has helped a wide range of customers globally across industries – including Unilever, Nestle, Bukalapak, The Tata Group, BlueDart, and more – execute 650 million deliveries across 30+ countries across North America, Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, ANZ, and the Indian subcontinent. Its technology has also helped save $200 million in transit costs, offsetting 70 million kilograms in CO2 emissions while maintaining a 99.5% SLA adherence ratio. Locus’ order-to-delivery dispatch management platform helps enterprises transform their Last-Mile logistics operations into growth centres through advanced optimization algorithms and intuitive workflow automation that equip businesses with the tools needed to maximize efficiency while delighting customers.
In conversation with Nishith Rastogi, Founder & CEO of Locus.
How is the company solving last-mile delivery challenges globally?
While many companies might see Last-Mile logistics as a means to an end, they might not realize that optimizing these efforts can contribute to the bottom line. Especially in today’s times, where quick and on-time deliveries are non-negotiable to customer satisfaction, retention, and growth. Moreover, I firmly believe that companies that get the last mile right are at a strategic and overwhelming advantage. As long as last-mile fulfilment continues to be carried out by manual processes, it will be seen as a cost centre that is plagued by less than efficient decision-making, poor on-ground visibility, underutilized vehicles, high costs incurred from fuel spent on empty miles, delivery delays, inefficient handling of returns, etc.
This is where we come into the picture. Locus’ dispatch management platform is a real-world ready decision-making platform for last-mile excellence. Enterprises, whether they are e-commerce companies, retail brands, 3PLs or home services, can gain unparalleled visibility of order fulfilment across channels with the platform. The platform utilizes advanced optimization algorithms and intuitive workflow automation to learn from previous outcomes to improve dispatch planning, scheduling, and routing. It makes every delivery more efficient than the last, which results in fewer miles traveled, and more deliveries being done in a day. As a result, the platform also equips workforces for excellence and enables companies to scale with lower emissions and bring sustainable growth.
Currently, our platform is being implemented and used by more than 200+ enterprises across 30+ countries globally to power more than 650M last-mile deliveries. We are proud to count Unilever, Nestle, Bukalapak, The Tata Group, BigBasket, and BlueDart as some of our valued customers.
Give a detailed introduction about Locus order-to-delivery dispatch management platform?
Locus built its end-to-end order-to-delivery dispatch management platform to bring a new lease of life to last-mile fulfilment and minimize hundreds of planning hours to mere minutes. The platform offers five key modules that span across the order, carrier, contract, dispatch, and driver management, providing enterprises with a rich ecosystem for all their needs under a single roof while also being modular to cater to specific use cases alongside existing business systems.
For example, the Route Planning module takes into account 180+ real-world constraints such as the size of the vehicle, fuel consumption, service level agreements, and road restrictions to find optimal routes that maximize on-time deliveries while minimizing fuel consumption.
Based on our extensive experience with our 200+ implementations, our very real-world interface is highly personalized and configurable to meet the diverse use cases and requirements of different industries and geographies. For example, the road infrastructure, rules, and compliance norms across 30+ countries right from the USA to India to Indonesia and Japan are factored into the platform. This makes for quick deployment of a platform already rich with global-local customizations for Locus’ clients.
We also have one of the most advanced analytics platforms powered by AI and ML that brings out valuable insights across intuitive dashboards to meet operational needs and aid in strategic planning. All hygiene features on alerts and notifications can also be automated to pre-empt delays at any stage of the fulfilment process.
You are saying the company offers predictable home deliveries. Give us a brief example?
By predictability, we refer to the consistency with which deliveries adhere to service level agreements. For example, if a food delivery company receives an order, Locus’ Route Planning Solution can calculate an estimated arrival time by accounting for hundreds of real-world constraints. If no unavoidable delays take place (food preparation takes longer, a sudden accident leads to a traffic jam) and drivers diligently follow the routes given to them, the reliability of these ETAs becomes high enough that food delivery companies can confidently share them with the end-consumer, thereby building their trust and adding value to the post-purchase consumer experience. Companies can take this experience one step further by automating the sending of ‘ahead of time’ messages if their orders are delivered ahead of ETAs.
What are your Unique Selling Points of Locus that are different from its other competitors?
Not just visibility but also decision-making and an intuitive user experience is what Locus’ dispatch management platform provides to its customers. We leverage the most advanced AI, ML and data analytics systems, architected by our data scientists, to create our product suite. To elaborate a bit further, as Locus powers increasingly complex supply chains, dispatchers rely on Locus’s AI to compute billions of combinations to quickly seek out the ideal sequence by which every order can be fulfilled with the least resources spent. Furthermore, our machine learning algorithm continually observes these decisions made by the AI. It evaluates how they play out in the real world, improving each on-ground execution and continuously improving performance.
The client interface of our dispatch management platform is designed to help digitize and automate all aspects of the last-mile fulfilment process from end to end, including the experience that the end consumer receives. Role-based access allows for a high degree of data and consumer information security. Security and privacy is a top priority with the platform – It is GDPR compliant across 27 countries, HOS ready, and equipped with ISO-certified security measures and role-based access control for operational integrity.
From the ground up, Locus was built with provisions to grow rapidly. Our entire product suite can be accessed through APIs without requiring manual intervention. This interoperability has proved indispensable to large enterprises, making integrations with their existing CRM, ERP, WMS, OMS, and other systems a quick and painless task. Our platform-based ecosystem allows businesses to activate individual solutions as and when needed, which drastically improves deployment times, change management, and the ease of onboarding.
All of the above factors position us very unique in the market.
What are your future & Expansion plans?
Given the vast opportunity that last-mile logistics presents, we are extremely excited about our growth. We have proved that our solutions bring value to our customers. Most importantly, we have assembled a team of functional experts and successfully established a global footprint. We have completed a stage called Initial Scale in a startup’s journey and from here on, we are looking to scale up to a “centaurs” (100 million in recurring revenue). To achieve this, we are working on the following:
- Continue to fortify our product suite to deliver growth for our clients: The launch of the Locus dispatch management platform this year is a step towards further unlocking growth for our clients, helping them convert the last-mile operations from a cost center to a revenue generator. With product at our core, we will continue to build solutions for the future of the last mile.
- Strengthen India’s client base while adding value from our global footprint: Having established a strong footprint across 30+ countries, we will continue to bring in best practices and experiences from all our markets and clients who are leaders across various industries ranging from e-commerce to FMCG, e-grocery, e-pharma, Industrial Services, Manufacturing, 3PL and CEP, and Home Services among others.
- Grow efficiently: As we embark on this scaling stage, we will continue to maintain healthy margins and closely manage our business efficiency. We are aiming for growth and, most importantly, quality-efficient growth.