The CEO and Founder of Locus, Nishith Rastogi, outlines the dispatch management platform for superior last-mile delivery.
The Middle East, especially the GCC, is home to millions of consumers that increasingly prefer to pull a wide range of goods and services from the convenience of their homes. For this modern-day tech-savvy consumer, a predictable, convenient, and seamless fulfilment is equally essential as diversity in product choice and competitive pricing. This is why 17 out of 20 consumers favour brands that go above and beyond in customer experience.
Prompted by these trends, businesses across significant industries like e-commerce, retail, e-grocery, and third-party logistics (3PLs) are witnessing considerable growth and robust customer demand. Therefore, they want to adopt intelligent technology platforms to achieve operational excellence in their last-mile operations.
“Enterprises in the Middle East now have a unique opportunity to differentiate themselves by catering to diverse consumer preferences. With the help of intelligent decision-making platforms like Locus, they can provide exponential growth and scale by automating key processes, enlisting the services of third-party delivery providers, and providing memorable fulfilment experiences with real-time visibility on orders and diverse channels of communication,” says Nishith Rastogi, Founder and CEO, Locus.
A Fresh Take On Logistics Excellence
Amid these swift tides of change, Locus is a game-changer in last-mile logistics. It is a leading technology company on a mission to enable last-mile excellence for enterprises worldwide. It works closely with some global companies across industries – Unilever, Nestle, Bukalapak, The Tata Group, BlueDart, and more. Its advanced customer experience and dispatch management platform make each delivery better than the last with innovative technology solutions powered by Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
“By leveraging the hard-earned insights from 850 million successful deliveries for more than 200 clients across 30+ countries, our market-leading solutions transform last-mile logistics from cost centres into profitable avenues. They are constantly pushing the efficiency envelope and promoting sustainable last-mile operations. We also leverage the deep and nuanced understanding of the Middle East business landscape to help businesses scale up their operations to multiple regions of the GCC,” says Nishith.
One such example is the UAE-based multinational conglomerate Lulu Group International. With the help of Locus Solutions, Lulu Group International’s e-commerce arm facilitated efficient hyper-local, on-demand deliveries, significantly enhancing their post-purchase customer experience.
“Lulu’s e-grocery operations across 6 GCC countries have thrived with Locus as our partner. We have achieved outstanding SLAs in on-time deliveries, reduced operational costs significantly, and gained enhanced visibility into on-ground operations to ensure seamless deliveries,” said Shinhas Majeed, Group General Manager – eCommerce at Lulu Group International. “Our 150+ workforce has praised the Locus platform and apps for their intuitive, user-friendly design, and we love how responsive and hands-on the team has been in our association so far.”
Innovative Solutions Driving Real-World Growth
The key pillars of Locus’ integrated, end-to-end platform—Order Management, Dispatch Planning, Hybrid Fleet Management, Track and Trace, and Insights and Analytics— tackle the challenges of today’s logistics sector with data-driven decision-making.
Automating and digitising last-mile fulfilment processes such as route planning, parcel sorting, order management, and exchanges and returns empowers drivers to make more deliveries in a single shift, keeps costs in check, and ensures seamless fulfilment for consumers. For instance, the Route Planning module considers over 180 real-world constraints to ensure efficient routes. These are automatically updated in real-time to account for sudden obstacles or accommodate new, high-priority orders.
On the other end, its Track and Trace features offer a holistic view of all operations in real-time, reducing uncertainties’ impact on operations. The platform’s Analytics and Insights features analyse billions of data points to reveal deep inefficiencies and new growth opportunities. These solutions operate on a single source of truth and constantly communicate with each other. In doing so, businesses can achieve seamless operations and elevate customer satisfaction.
Take UAE-based last-mile logistics company Shyft, for example. By working with Locus, Shyft has achieved an unprecedented reduction in cost per booking while scaling up its fulfilment operations. The result? A staggering sevenfold increase in successful deliveries within a year.
“Partnering with Locus has been a pivotal decision in our growth story. Their Customer Experience and Dispatch Management Platform revolutionised our logistics operations from end to end. Automating our processes led to a drastic improvement in our fulfilment rate from 80% to 94% and an increase in on-time deliveries from 70% to 95%, Rehan Ali Syed – Managing Partner, Shyft. “Within just a year, we saw a 7x growth in successful deliveries and a reduction in our cost per booking. Locus’ commitment to our vision and their unwavering customer support has solidified them as a service provider and a key ally in our goal to aid the next 100,000 e-commerce businesses in the Middle East.”
A Vision For the Future
Locus continues to have a pulse on the significant market trends to further evolve its offerings. Its objective is to drive the maximum value for businesses and stakeholders in the Middle East and worldwide. To that end, the latest among its innovative solutions is the Delivery Linked Checkout (DLC). It provides customers with multiple delivery windows, facilitates effortless order cancellations based on their preferences, and reduces shopping cart abandonment for E-commerce sites, a significant issue for them.
It also recently introduced Last-Mile Maturity Assessment. In less than seven minutes, this novel tool enables businesses to assess the level of maturity of their operations, understand their strengths, uncover hidden inefficiencies, and spot new growth opportunities.
“Locus also maintains an unwavering commitment to sustainable operations. We’ve worked with leading enterprises worldwide to give them visibility on emissions. They minimised emissions from the distance travelled, fleet utilisation, and planning time. We have saved 57 million miles in transit distance and bring about emission savings equivalent to the volume sequestered by 25,000+ acres of forest cover every year,” says Nishith.
The powerful combination of a customer-centric mission, vision, and innovation solidifies Locus’s position as a market leader in technology solutions that can unlock new growth opportunities in the GCC by enabling scalability, cost efficiency, and delightful consumer experiences.