The Indian economy has been experiencing stellar growth over the past decade and a large part of that growth is fueled by the India consumption story. With increasing disposable incomes across urban and rural India, the consumption story has just about started to roll.

E commerce has now left the realms of large cities and has moved to smaller towns and cities and even to rural India. A large part of this success is driven by easy access to internet, smartphones and a robust logistics network. Needless to say that the combination of these factors and many others have helped keep the growth ticking in these markets. Since the breaking out of distribution in rural markets, the logistics had to keep pace with the same. A lot of entrepreneurial young people did get into last mile logistics wherein they would pick up material coming from big logistics companies and do the last mile distribution in their towns and villages. This not only gave impetus to the industry but also made a lot of independent entrepreneurs who could now get a great opportunity in their own home towns.

The biggest challenge when it came to these markets was about the visibility of delivery and reverse logistics. These logistics personnel did a good job at delivery of material but did not have computers or an office to make Delivery updations which were getting delayed. The clerical work of updating the records was taking a toll on the e commerce and large logistics companies as their payouts were linked to successful deliveries. One of our logistics customers was faced with the same dilema wherein they did offer services deep into the rural hinterland but unfortunately they were not able to gather delivery reports as expected. This not only led to a lot of trouble in recovering payments from customers, but also caused a lot of strain with the local providers as the visibility of delivery wasn’t clear.

That is when we offered a complete mobility solution to the last mile delivery and branch operations team.

Everything from

• manifesting,
• re-routing,
• delivery and returns

were moved to a simple app which could be used from the phone. With the ability to run operations online and offline it gave the flexibility to keep the operations in sync with the urban branches.

The app offered

• real time visibility about cash on delivery shipments,
• the amount of money being carried by each delivery boy
• kept a track of the exact time lines for connecting the shipments and making the deliveries.

The entire solution was designed with keeping in mind the target audience which was not always very highly educated hence a lot of the UX was icon based and color coded making it easier to understand and explain. The journey has just started and with more growth and challenges expected as the business permeates through new markets we expect a lot of new features to be built into the application.