Learnings@Locus: What Makes Every Delivery More Efficient Than the Last

School may make up only a few years of our life but education is a lifetime’s work. And if we pay enough attention to the world, learning becomes a constant companion.

Some of these lessons are foreseen, others find us out of the blue. The bearers of these lessons have all kinds of faces too; easily identifiable in youth—taking the obvious forms of parents, school teachers, football coaches—and becoming more and more unexpected in the years that follow. 

Our learnings at Locus are plenty. They are also unceasing. Ours is the kind of success story that is not unheard of: we started from scratch (two-bedroom apartment, to be precise) and over the course of seven years have managed to expand to over 30 countries with offices all over the world. 

With over 650 million deliveries executed, the Locus Platform has helped brands across e-commerce, e-grocery, retail, manufacturing, 3PL, and home service (phew!) industries. We continue to unlock the true potential of their last-mile logistics by helping them fulfill more orders and scale up sustainably with fewer vehicles.

None of this would have been possible had we not fallen down and gotten back on our feet over and over again. Learning is an ongoing process, and our product is ever-evolving, which is also a part of the charm of working with Locus—we’re constantly, consistently growing, and we’re here to help you grow with every delivery too. 

We’ve had so much to learn from clients, old and new, and these learnings make us who we are today. Which is why this week: we’re taking the opportunity to thank all those who’ve chosen to be with us on this growth journey by sharing some key learnings. 

PT Agro Boga Utama

Agro Boga Utama is leading frozen meat and vegetable distributor serving 100+ cities with 19 hubs across Indonesia (Jakarta, Java, Bali, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan). In addition, the company has 7,400 partners with 1,500 products.

For several years, Agro Boga had been manually carrying out everything from order management to distribution. There was also a clear underutilization of vehicles due to a lack of insight on fleet allocation and a high dependency on human intelligence to sort shipments. 

This was an opportunity for Locus to step up as a complete Transport Management System (TMS) helping the company plan, execute, and streamline its entire supply chain, starting from managing the customers, drivers, locations, sellers and acting as a machine learning platform. 

Download the case study to delve into the details of it 

BigBasket

BigBasket is one of those brands that puts customers over all else. Customer experience and product quality is also what sets it apart from its competitors. So the directions for Locus were clear: nothing matters more than making the delivery on time. 

Locus’ biggest learning with BigBasket has been to grow and evolve with the ever-changing market demands. This could prove to be tricky, given the perishable nature of the products. The small window between the order and delivery time dictates a very short planning time for shipments. 

Locus’ algorithm has been customized to cater for BigBasket’s specific constraints which ensures that this end goal is always achieved. Detailed insights and reports help in making better business decisions and identifying the top performing and laggard business units and resources.

Watch this video to see how Locus helped BigBasket adhere to their SLAs.

Unilever

One of Locus’ oldest and most loved clients, Unilever has been associated with us since 2017. These years of service make Unilever one of the few rare enterprises that places trust in Locus in experimenting new processes, bringing new and inventive ideas to the table and even questioning the status quo. The brand has provided a great learning experience for Locus and helped us understand Unilever’s business and technical landscape really well. 

Deep dive into Unilever’s case study

Bazaar

Bazaar has dedicated themselves to creating a suite of digital products to not just empower merchants but simplify and grow their businesses as well. Their vision is to build an online marketplace that directly connects retailers with wholesalers and manufacturers across the country. 

Bazaar came to Locus with a unique problem: their orders had a wide range of weights and volumes, which made allocation and routing tricky. Scaling the business exacerbated the challenges with volume too and required customized solutions. 

Locus’ learnings from Bazaar have been to constantly identify opportunities where tech can automate manual dependencies—solutions which came in the form of volumetric planning and a zonal-based routing system that helped bring rider-customer affinity. 

With Locus, Bazaar has been able to optimize their delivery routes across different cities, grow across multiple geographies and increase their vehicle by 2x by introducing double runs with their smart algorithms. Locus also helped reduce their planning time by 90%.

Shyft UAE

A relatively new Locus client, Shyft was first launched in the United Arab Emirates as a luggage delivery and airline check-in experiment in 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic had other plans, however, when all international travel came to a grinding halt.

The company persevered and has now evolved into a modern logistics company that primarily caters to e-commerce businesses. Shyft has served over 1250 business customers through its portal in the UAE and plans to expand across the (GCC) Gulf Cooperation Council. 

Following the completion of its integration with Locus’ logistic solutions in August 2021, Shyft ran into some unforeseeable roadblocks. Team Locus, mirroring Shyft’s tenacity, worked round-the-clock with their internal team to get things back on track in three days. We realized that walking the talk around being there for a client resonates meaningfully with them. The business has seen a 7x growth in successful deliveries in the last 12 months.

Read more about their success story.

https://blog.locus.sh/shyft-leap-last-mile-excellence-with-locus/