Sustainable Supply Chain

Optimising Supply Chain Deliveries - A Chat With FarEye CRO Amit Bagga

July 08, 2022 Tom Raftery / Amit Bagga Season 1 Episode 240
Sustainable Supply Chain
Optimising Supply Chain Deliveries - A Chat With FarEye CRO Amit Bagga
Digital Supply Chain +
Become a supporter of the show!
Starting at $3/month
Support
Show Notes Transcript

If there's one part of the supply chain that can seriously do with improvement, it is the last mile delivery part.

How often have you stayed home waiting for a delivery that didn't come, or didn't come when it said it would, arrived damaged, or worse still, not at all?

One company aiming to fix that is FarEye. To find out more about how they're doing that I spoke to Amit Bagga, their Chief Revenue Officer

We had a fascinating conversation, I learned loads, I hope you do too...

If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to leave me a voice message over on my SpeakPipe page or just send it to me as a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn. Audio messages will get played (unless you specifically ask me not to).

If you want to learn more about how to juggle sustainability and efficiency mandates while recovering from pandemic-induced disruptions, meeting growth targets, and preparing for an uncertain future, check out our Oxford Economics research report here.

And if you want to read up on our Industry 4.0 blueprint repost, head on over to https://www.sap.com/cmp/dg/intro-industry40/index.html, and if you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it. Thanks.

And remember, stay healthy, stay safe, stay sane! 

Support the show


Podcast supporters
I'd like to sincerely thank this podcast's generous supporters:

  • Lorcan Sheehan
  • Krishna Kumar
  • Olivier Brusle
  • Alicia Farag
  • Joël VANDI
  • Luis Olavarria
  • Alvaro Aguilar

And remember you too can Support the Podcast - it is really easy and hugely important as it will enable me to continue to create more excellent Digital Supply Chain episodes like this one.

Podcast Sponsorship Opportunities:
If you/your organisation is interested in sponsoring this podcast - I have several options available. Let's talk!

Finally
If you have any comments/suggestions or questions for the podcast - feel free to just send me a direct message on Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you liked this show, please don't forget to rate and/or review it. It makes a big difference to help new people discover it.

Thanks for listening.

Amit Bagga:

We've had, companies where we've been able to reduce the delivery windows that they promised to customers and be able to deliver in lesser time than they promised to the customers. We've had about 20, 25%, improvement in the accuracy of the delivery times, that they promised to customers. This as you can imagine is a huge impact, in customer satisfaction

Tom Raftery:

good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the digital supply chain podcast. The number one podcast, focusing on the digitization of supply chain. And I'm your host global vice-president at SAP Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the digital supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery with SAP and with me on the show today, I have my special guest Amit. Amit, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Amit Bagga:

Sure, hello, Tom. Great to be here. Folks. My name is Amit Bagga. I'm the chief revenue officer at FarEye and, uh, chief revenue officer. I look after all our customer engagement functions. Focused on growth and delivery of services to our customers and help them get a great experience and optimize their logistics operations. FarEye to introduce the company is a SaaS platform. We're focused on helping shippers like retailers, e-commerce companies, D2C companies and logistics service providers like, 3PLs, courier express parts of companies to digitalize their mid and last mile operations for delivery. And Tom, we talked about this earlier, you know, the world of retail and logistics is, uh, changing rapidly. It's driven by, changing consumer expectations. You couple that with, the all prominent, supply chain problems that are happening, unpredictability of, the supply chains. And this is causing a real whiplash, in the, in the industry and really causing troubles right across from the factory to the consumer. And this is creating stress in logistics and increasing the difficulty in the predictability of deliveries, uh, meeting SLAs, uh, cost of logistics is going up, especially in the last mile. And then you add to that the expectation, changes and demands of customers, uh, every day, right? They want flexible options. They want returns, and all of those things. So all that is adding to the rising tide of problems for customers, our customers, which we help them solve with our so.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Super. And I was saying, as we were prepping for this, that I had Joel McKelvie from Sisu data on the podcast recently, and he was talking about a survey they did, a Harris poll of about 2000 consumers across north America, where they were saying, you know, have you had any issues with deliveries in the last few weeks and something like 80% of respondents said they had, and the issues were, you know, damaged goods delivered or not delivered, missing articles, everything like that across the whole spectrum. And a, a significant number of the respondents said that as a consequence of that, they would no longer use the brand that was responsible for the delivery, not the delivery company who was responsible for the issue, but actually the brand that they were purchasing from. So delivery issues reflect not so much on the delivery companies, but actually on the brand that you're purchasing from. So that's gotta be a, a huge challenge. And so, you talked Amit about some of the issues that are happening globally, the big macro trends, how is FarEye helping their, your customers with those issues? Hmm.

Amit Bagga:

So, Tom, I could not agree with you more. The survey findings are exactly the way we see the market as well. We know that about more than 60% of, a consumer's, decision point for coming back to the brand to continue shopping with the brand, or leave the brand is based on their post purchase experience. And what that means is from the point that they've clicked the button to pay for the goods to the time they receive it, what is the experience they have? What is the flexibility for them to be able to return it if need? And this is increasingly important now for not just the retailers and the brands to know, to control, but the logistics companies that are servicing these brands as well. Everybody has to be focused on how do you optimize that customer experience create that optionality and flexibility that helps these customers have a great experience through the journey. FarEye is helping both retailers, D2C companies, logistics companies, all of them optimize their delivery orchestration in a way that is focused towards creating a great consumer experience. So we are helping customers who either own their own fleets or outsource their fleets, to third party logistics companies or, courier express parcel companies, or DSPs to help create a unified ex experience. And we do that by creating very high level of visibility, real time visibility, to understand where your products are in the network. We help allocate orders across different delivery platforms, across different delivery providers to provide the most efficient ways of doing things for consumers because of this visibility, we can help the brands give very flexible options of delivery. You can choose through slots that you wanna deliver on, you can choose through convenient ways in which you want to deliver. You want to, you want to do a click and collect. You want do, be able to have a curbside pickup. You want to have delivered to your door. You wanna deliver to the office. You want to change your delivery as it's in progress by communicating with the drivers or with the company, to be able to make those changes in real time. and also have the flexibility to have an optimized returns policy through these same networks is core to what we do. We are also helping customers that have their own fleets, like the quick commerce companies, the, QSR or, or, restaurant chains, et cetera, or hyper local deliveries, like groceries, where they have their own things. We help create a, we have a driver application that gives turn by navigation and route optimization to the drivers so that there is a, sophisticated way in which customers and drivers, get, get updates in real time of what's happening and their ability to have, uh, safe deliveries be, you know, with COVID around electronic proof of deliveries or touchless deliveries and things like that. So getting this kind of optionality for customers is becoming increasingly important and having the brand being represented in the right way to the customers, is uniquely important for us to help our customers retain their consumers.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Very good. As someone who is at the end of that chain, receiving deliveries. For me, the frustration is often that I get a notification that I'm about to get a delivery. And it gives me a link to check on the delivery and the delivery says it will arrive sometime tomorrow. And that's it. That's all the info I get. And the following day, I go to the link and I refresh and I refresh and I refresh and it says it, if I'm lucky, it says it is out for delivery. And that's as much information as I get. And, you know, if it told me it's coming between one o'clock and three o'clock, at least that might be something and some delivery companies in fairness, do that. But some just say, it'll come sometime tomorrow and it's out for delivery and that's as much as you get. Can FarEye help me in a scenario where you're involved in a delivery, get more information than that?

Amit Bagga:

Absolutely Tom. So you should give a list of the places where you've been ordering and not getting I'm gonna go and talk to them about FarEye, because this is exactly the experience that we want consumers to not have and have a much more improved experience. Imagine that you are, on a customer website and you want to be able to, you wanna order your, goods and you want to have two, three options. One is what is the cost of delivery? Can I have different variations of if, if I wanna pay more because I wanted now less, because I want it later. I'm flexible with where I want, therefore I can pay even lesser or I want specific times tomorrow, day after Thursday, Friday. And I could, make my judgment call based on cost. I can get my judgment call based on convenience of when I want that delivered. If it was a big and bulky product, can I have a service along with it, two person delivery along with it? What's the kind of, you know, I want it on second floor of my house, et cetera. And how about the fact that you could have flexibility to engage like that? And then. As you are going through that, things happen in life and you wanna be able to change that and being able to get back on and saying, Hey, I don't want it now. I've changed my mind. I want it at this point in time, or I'm gonna be in my office. Can you deliver to me in the office? Right. The ease and simplicity of engaging, of being able to make those changes really in real time and get your deliveries rescheduled. Not just that. If you are particularly sensitive to the impact that these deliveries are having on the, on the climate, on the environment, we can help our customers optimize, their delivery networks in such a way that you can have an option to choose a green delivery window. A window where we have reduced the carbon emissions on the, on the, on the thing. And the reason the way we can do this is once the customers, onboard onto the FarEye platform, we have absolute visibility of all the assets that they have to deploy. If they have their own fleets, we have a complete visibility of the fleet. And what is happening at, at what point in time, what orders are allocated, where in which days, and how that route's gonna be delivered. On the other hand, where customers have outsourced fleet, we are connected to all the carriers or the, dedicated service providers, DSPs that those customers have. And we have visibility into the orders that they can deliver. We know what it costs for them to deliver the order. We know the SLAs that typically meet when they're delivering. So we can actually make judgment call based on the fact that these, delivery providers are particularly good on this route, these on the other routes, they're not good at these routes so we can make allocations of orders in real time based on cost, based on the way that they can execute the orders based on the SLAs they've met based on the customer experience they've created. And we are able to help provide those windows to the end consumer so that they can make those calls and those flexibility. The same thing happens in the returns process. We help our customers use the same network. In case you want to return your goods. How do you do that? That same flexibility now comes into play from a returns perspective as well, which you know is about 20% now, of the world's business is in, in returns. So that starts becoming equally important as well. So those are really important factors. That visibility helps provide for the customers to be able to create that experience. So I'm sure, when we've spoken to these, uh, customers of yours that you ordered from, and I've, talked to them about FarEye, I am sure you'll have a better experience Tom.

Tom Raftery:

Okay. Good. Good, good. So Amit, can you talk to some outcomes your customers have had some positive outcomes from using your platform?

Amit Bagga:

Sure, so Tom like I said, you know, we, we've got multiple types of customers on our platforms. We've got, we've got retailers that are as big as Walmart, uh, using our platform Wayfair. Furniture, we've got, the world's largest pizza chain, uh, that we deliver to not allowed to say their name, but you know who they are. Uh, we've got, we've got, logistics companies like DHL. in the large scale, and then we've even got, uh, you know, niche focused companies like post Finland post using us for, for delivering their services. Emirates post uses us to help them execute their Amazon deliveries. Right? So we've got companies across the world that use us in various ways and we are working hard to improve all aspects of the KPIs that they wanna achieve for their supply chains, right? For the logistics networks. I wouldn't go specifics unto which customers, but we've had customers that we have looked at increasing their productivity through better asset management. The driver management, the, the vehicle management, the ability to optimize those, routes, et cetera. And we've been able to demonstrably improve their, the management productivity by about 15% to 20%. We've had, companies where we've been able to reduce the delivery windows that they promised to customers and be able to deliver in lesser time than they promised to the customers. We've had about 20, 25%, uh, improvement in the accuracy of the delivery times, that they promised to customers. This as you can imagine is a huge impact, in customer satisfaction. One important thing that happens is because of the lack of interaction with customers, quite often, brands are delivering to customers and they're not there at home. Right? or in, in B2B environments, you miss your slots, which you have in the warehouses, which are allocated to you. You miss your slots and you pay penalties and you lose time. We've been able to improve 25 to 30%, in terms of the first attempt of delivery, success rates for these customers. So, imagine that reducing the number of times that they've gone back and forth, back and forth, trying to deliver orders, taking that 25% out of, the cost is a huge improvement for those customers as well. The other thing is we also help our customers get realtime feedback from their customers. So, you know, the application allows our customers when the driver delivers the order to the customer, we are able to help them get instant, NPS scores so, they can, give the feedback rating right there, and that helps improve, their service levels as well. So we had, uh, one of our customers go from and they were, they were measuring their, NPS from one scale of one to five. they were at about a 4.2 average out of five. And within the first week that they landed, they launched FarEye into their network and they were delivering, using FarEye. It went from 4.2, 4.3 to 4.9 consistently for the next months and became one of the most downloaded apps in the country. So those are the way tangible ways in which we can help our customers, drive real value very quickly, using the FarEye system.

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Fantastic. And where to from here?

Amit Bagga:

So, you know, we are doubling down on a, a, a bunch of things. We are more focused on helping our customers get time to value in a much shorter timeframe. We are looking at customers, driving value within the first two to three weeks of, engaging with FarEye. We're working on measuring the carbon footprint that we help our customers reduce, help them get their sustainability goals. So you will see us very shortly launch, a sustainability framework, for our customers, as well, where we will work with them to optimize the deliveries, reduce the empty miles in the environment. and help bring that to the forefront because that's a boardroom agenda nowadays and, you know, help them bring that forward and help them, optimize the, the deliveries and, and create a much better environment to be delivering in. The other thing that we are working on as well is, helping our customers drive much more data driven decision making in the mid mile and last mile of deliveries. And what that means is, the world of logistics is all about continuous optimization, continuous improvement, continuous flexibility. So we are working on the data that we work with and optimize ourselves is the data we are gonna now present to our customers and help them use those, dashboards and those improvements to, to start building out a much more self learning application that helps them go into more of a prescriptive to a predictive, uh, model of delivery in the logistics space. Right? Those are the areas that we are focused on. And the third one, which is really the secret sauce for FarEye is our, business process, uh, management tool, a BPM tool BPM tool is a low-code tool that we have, which helps customers to, solve very complex delivery problems and workflows and scenarios, in their environments. What that means is, customers can now launch new offerings, new service offerings into the market, much faster with very little cost. We can have customers that could be purely using us for grocery launch apparel, fast or launch big bulky solutions, fast or launch a new service offering within a specific area, right. and apparel manufacturer, or at apparel, retailer can move to offer premium delivery services with a, with a click of a button. With us, and we can help logistics companies launch various different types of customers, uh, without having to create different models for each one of them by using these tools. So we are very excited, with these offerings and, are looking forward to, helping our customers, uh, get great value from FarEye, Um,

Tom Raftery:

Fantastic. Fantastic. Amit, we're coming towards the end of the podcast, now. Is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had, or any aspect of this that we have not touched on, that you think it's important for people to be aware of? Um,

Amit Bagga:

Yes, I think we've, touched on most things Tom, one thing that was in my head as, uh, we were going, you know, we were talking about this was with the current, the backdrop of the rising interest rates, fear of recession, the softening of the market and all, companies are going to be looking to optimize their costs, and create a better, more runway for the business. Right. whilst they're doing that, they have to be able to retain their customers and and continue to build more business with them cos the revenue has to continue to go up. And I couldn't help thinking that, you know, this is probably where, especially in the world of deliveries FarEye can come into its own to help these customers, uh, whether the storm. So to speak, right? The focus, the intense focus that we have on lowering the cost of operations, creating new models for customers to create new consumer experiences, and optimize the assets that they have and get the most out of the assets they have, or reduce the footprint while still being able to deliver, across geographies, across, you know, multiple time zones, et cetera, is something that I believe for us is going to be the next challenge in the coming months to help, retailers and logistics companies, you know, D2C companies and, uh, to really get the maximum, use out of their investments and create a much longer runway for them as they go into this, uh, tough part of the economic cycle.

Tom Raftery:

Right. Very good. Very good. Very good. Okay. Amit, if people want to know more about yourself or about FarEye or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them?

Amit Bagga:

So we would love to have a have chat with anyone that's interested in knowing more about us. Uh, they should basically visit our website. We've got a, we've got a chat bot over there. They can actually log in and, and look, look at us. So, uh, we are on www.fareye.com, F a R E Y e.com. that's the place to get us at. Otherwise you know, by all means, send a mail to me, Amit, a M I T. Dot B a GGA bagga, @fari.com.

Tom Raftery:

Amit that's been great. Thanks a million for joining us on the podcast today.

Amit Bagga:

Thank you, Tom. It was very nice to talk to you as well, and, um, stay safe.

Tom Raftery:

Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about digital supply chains, head on over to sap.com/digital supply chain, or, or simply drop me an email to Tom dot Raftery @sap.com. If you like the show, please, don't forget to subscribe to it in your podcast application at choice to get new episodes, as soon as they are published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks, catch you all next time.

Podcasts we love