New Technologies Can Fuel Business Growth

The following interview appeared in the print version of Enterprise Channels MEA, pages 35 and 35, May 2023 edition.

What are the core business and activities of your organization? 

Shipsy’s smart logistics management platform empowers global businesses to automate, optimize, orchestrate, track, and simplify end-to-end logistics operations. We empower businesses to save costs, boost productivity, predict delivery failures, ensure sustainability, enhance CX, and build self-governing supply chains through our 25+ modules. These include digital CX, route optimization, ShipsyBI, book engine, hub ops and mid-mile management, shipment execution, container tracking, finance operations, multi-carrier management, and more.

What are the typical challenges that a channel partner faces in large and medium-sized businesses? 

It’s critical to provide channels with hands-on training on products to display our solutions’ full potential to customers. Other areas that need focus will be improving the ability of channel partners to provide complete visibility of sales opportunities, customizing solution demonstration based on the customers’ unique challenges, and adhering to SLAs.

Shipsy’s partner program helps boost revenue, enhance domain authority, and market brand to improve reach.

What is end-to-end supply chain visibility, and why is it important for businesses to achieve it? 

End-to-end supply chain visibility enables real-time tracking of goods’ journeys across various touchpoints. It also entails transparency over data flow, finances, drivers and vehicles, and field operations. This brings numerous qualitative and quantitative benefits for an organization, such as curbing cost leakages, saving person-hours, mitigating risks, improving logistics operations and customer service, etc.

Discuss the role of supply chain automation in promoting sustainability. 

Automation-powered route planning and optimization engines automate route and vehicle selection. Such modern technologies help reduce the miles traveled per package and ensure that the miles traveled are greener. They factor in consignment data to automatically prioritize eco-friendly modes of transportation, helping businesses lower their carbon footprint.

How do you think digital transformation affects a company’s brand name? 

Digital transformation helps businesses to get data-driven insights into their operations. It allows them to leverage new-age technologies such as AI, ML, automation, Big Data, etc., to optimize and automate logistical operations and further enhance decision-making through actionable insights. It helps ensure on-time deliveries, real-time delivery visibility, flexible payments, personalized delivery experiences, and more, associating a brand with positive customer experiences.

What impact does digital transformation have on job roles and department responsibilities? 

Digitization offers greater opportunities for the gig economy, ensures high productivity levels, and helps optimize resource utilization. Digital transformation allows departments to ensure faster, data-driven decision-making, leverage analytics to constantly identify optimization pockets, unearth opportunities to save costs, predict failures, build proactive supply chains, and boost customer experience.

In general, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the current and future technological landscapes? 

Modern technologies like AI, ML, and predictive and prescriptive analytics are helping businesses save costs, identify new revenue streams, boost productivity, drastically improve the management of 3PLs and provide personalized delivery services.

Creating strong privacy policies around the application of disruptive technologies and investing in building robust data-security infrastructures will only help businesses accelerate the adoption of technologies like AI.

As digital culture amongst the next generation of workers and potential customers grows, how are you changing your products’ look and feel, brand and social appeal? 

The human element is critical while building B2B software. Today, individual users in enterprises are exposed to fantastic applications in their personal life. Imagine how easily we order food, groceries, medicines, and retail items. We need to provide enterprise users with similar experiences. For instance, Shipsy enables business users to track shipments in real-time and access accurate ETAs. Raise vehicle requests, identify invoicing errors, onboard riders, and more, all in real-time and with a few clicks.

Modernising and automating the supply chain has become one of the top priorities in the agenda of business transformation. There is a dire need to readdress and rethink the supply chain network and call for a more agile and resilient technology to future-proof the global supply chain. What’s your opinion on this? 

Investing in advanced technologies such as AI will help make global supply chains more resilient by accurately predicting and proactively addressing delivery failures. For instance, besides automatically gauging and alerting the delivery manager if delivery will be delayed, the system will also suggest remedial actions, such as assigning the delivery to another driver, to avoid breaching delivery SLAs. Similar use cases can be mirrored when moving goods across borders to drastically reduce transportation risks.

Such predictive and prescriptive capabilities can be extremely useful in real-time incident management, demand management, courier performance monitoring, and incentive management.

What are your current expectations from vendors, stakeholders, and consultants? 

We all need to collaborate and work towards transforming logistics using AI, ML, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics, and other state-of-the-art technologies. It will build more well-connected, agile, resilient, and proactive supply chains.