Gurugram, Date 14 April 2022: The much-awaited logistics virtual tech summit–Limitless, Powering The Next Wave of Commerce–hosted by Shipsy, concluded on a high note on April 6th. The event witnessed the participation of more than 500 supply chain executives from across the world and multiple industry stalwarts from marquee organizations.
The Limitless Summit is an influential global gathering of logistics, supply chain, retail, and trade industry professionals, driven by and for them. It provides a common platform for industry leaders to exchange learnings and best practices that will power the next wave of innovations to define, transform and drive the future of the industry.
“Evolving customer demands, intensifying competition, emergence of novel delivery models, sustainability goals and the need to balance cost and customer experience is triggering the next wave of transformation in commerce. Savvy businesses are leveraging automation, AI, ML, predictive analytics and more to build agile, resilient and cost-efficient supply chains,” said Soham Chokshi, Co-Founder and CEO, Shipsy, while inaugurating the summit.
The industry keynote by Sourabh Pandey, CXO – Fulfilment & Experience, Meesho, highlighted how businesses could reduce logistics costs and improve last-mile delivery experience.
“Cutting down investments in customer experience to boost profitability is not a solution. Bringing down the cost of inefficiency is key. To achieve this, the industry needs to find ways to bring together customers and last-mile agents and create more actionable data in the ecosystem,” Pandey said during the summit.
In a panel discussion moderated by Iyad Kamal, Former COO, Aramex and Advisor, Shipsy, the participants delved deep into the need for logistics transformation to address growing global demands.
“We have been managing customer clearance using logistics partners. But recently, we started working with country-specific postal authorities to clear customs, and they are doing an incredible job. Once we started disaggregating our logistics operations, we realized that postal makes a lot of sense for us,” said Apoorva Kumar, Senior Vice President – Logistics Services, Jumia Group.
Abhishek Chakraborty, Executive Director – DTDC Express, highlighted the significance of “data science” when it comes to accurately understanding “where to establish hubs,” “what kind of capacity to envision,” and “what kind of trucks best suit a job.” He highlighted that today 65-70% of decisions they take for their supply chain network and fleet are powered by data science.
“Businesses can buy off-the-shelf technologies that enable route optimization, help manage volume bounces easily, and get that extra 2-3% logistics efficiency while keeping customer experience intact,” said Steve Stanton, Chief Business Officer – Parcels & Express, Emirates Post.
Another key highlight of the summit was the second-panel discussion–Last-Mile Playbook: Lessons From Delivering To A Billion–moderated by Dhruv Agrawal, Co-founder and COO, Shipsy. The panelists talked about improving driver management, a critical part of modern commerce.
“We are rapidly building capabilities to ensure that our delivery executives have a dedicated service location to avoid hassling across a city. We ensure water facility is available to our riders 24×7. We ensure that they have enough space inside the store to wait during peak hours and see that executives have easy access to restrooms. Then we provide insurance for our riders and their families. We have doctors on call for them in case of emergencies and have an efficient credit facility for them,” said Vikas Sharma, Senior Vice President – Operations, Zepto.
“To enhance delivery agility, we have to set up dark stores closer to customers. We have taken inspiration from QSRs on how they manage to scale and keep their fixed costs low. They are generalists who taught us how to use LSPs to scale during peak hours efficiently,” said Haarshal Thakker, Head – Omni Channel & Hyperlocal Business, Wellness Forever Medicare.
“India’s eCommerce and Quick Commerce industry is thriving as it’s creating opportunities for people across different walks of life. Today, we have a significant number of women helping us manage our large warehouses. You will come across cases where a person joined us as a delivery executive but today has graduated to a manager level executive,” said Bhavik Jhaveri, Senior Director & Head of SCM (Outbound) Products, Myntra.
Visit https://shipsy.io/event/limitless2022-virtual/ to catch all that happened at Limitless 2022.
