The Future of Deliveries is Digital

What we are building at PandoCorp, and why.

Let’s say you order a meal through an app. It costs you< 300 bucks, and takes ~45 minutes to arrive. You can get the ETA, track the order, pay for it, and rate the experience, at the touch of a button. The app (company) knows the status of your delivery, how much you paid (and receives it immediately), and your satisfaction level, versus mine. They also know our ordering patterns, and tastes and use this information to serve us better food, and experiences, everyday. This is true for taxis, restaurants, groceries and carpenters, today, and boy, do we love it!

Now let’s say you ordered something worth 300,000 bucks, was fragile, and takes weeks to arrive. Would you expect a similar experience? What if you did this hundreds of times, every day? Would you want more, or less information about all of your deliveries?

B2B Logistics is a black-box — and the costs are huge

Unfortunately though, this great user-experience is restricted to e-commerce deliveries — which barely scratches the surface of global commerce. A majority of global (read: “traditional”) commerce is driven by B2B deliveries, that operate with little to no information. Irrespective of industry or scale, outsourced logistics is hugely fragmented, multi-tiered and low on tech. This leads to an enormous number of intermediaries between pure demand (shippers) and pure supply (vehicle owners/drivers). Companies are forced to deal with a few dozen entities for each delivery — transporters, brokers, vendors, and partners for first mile, long-haul, last mile, warehousing, and transshipment. Documents, payments, and information are held in silos, and transacted in, physically.

Physical exchange of Information, Transactions, Communication, Documentation: No visibility over Customer Satisfaction | No standard workflows | No Accountability | No Data (post-transaction) for Decision Making

Irrespective of industry or scale, outsourced logistics is hugely fragmented, multi-tiered and low on tech.

Shockingly, even the world’s largest companies — that have efficient, digital workflows to manage their customers, finances, assets, and employees — coordinate their deliveries using multiple spreadsheets and emails, everyday. Thousands of reams of paper, litres of ink, and calls and SMSs are invested in tracking, monitoring, reporting, and communicating progress of each delivery. Tragically, all of this data disappears at the end of every transaction. The consequent lack of (equal access to, and analyses of) information makes deliveries inefficient, and costly.

Companies of all sizes are weighed down by these costs. Our research showed that proactive supply-chain managers and COOs at pioneering companies all over the world had repeatedly tried solving this problem. Some companies had sponsored in-house products. Others had implemented expensive Transport Management Systems available in the market. These products, some ingenious, had been costly to build, took years to implement, were cumbersome to maintain, and feature-focused to the point that they were often not scalable, or user-friendly — at best relegating them to legacy systems that were not very helpful, or at worst, making them completely unusable.

This problem is big. In India alone, outsourced logistics rakes up ~US$ 200 Billion every year. Globally, this number is close to 10 Trillion. Assuming inefficiencies account for 2% of top-line, we are looking at a $200 Bn problem (TAM). Developing economies face challenges similar to those in India, under almost identical market structures. Excitingly, that is most of the world.

Building The Future of Deliveries™

At Pando, we are digitizing deliveries to optimise transaction costs, for companies of all sizes. The Pando Platform is India’s first open-market, digital delivery management system, that is built to help traditional businesses to optimise for a connected economy. It is intelligent, predictive, and scalable, and allows companies to control their fragmented, multi-tiered logistics exosystems through unique, delightful interfaces for every user (‘System of Engagement’), with a standardised workflow (‘System of Record’). We are built to digitise, and handle millions of deliveries everyday for large, distributed companies, but work just as well for for forward thinking businesses of all sizes.

Our clients use the our Enterprise Suite to digitise information, communication, transactions and documentation. They use our features to track, control, forecast and optimise their deliveries, everyday. They trust us enough to give us access to their data, allow us to interface with their clients, and take important decisions based on analyses that we make possible.

Through the past few months of private beta, and the past two years of talking to supply-chain managers, CEOs and COOs, truck owners and drivers, we have learned a lot, and continue to adapt features to new use cases, and build new features to counter infrastructural challenges. Some of these experts were so enthused by our approach that they opened out their older products/experiments for us to learn from. They have spent hours with our team, running us through what worked, and what didn’t, in their years of experimenting. This has reduced our ‘learning phase’ by months, and allowed us to build deep, meaningful relationships with them.

With these clients, and other companies that we continue to engage with, we have seen a lot of excitement for Pando’s products. To our pleasant surprise, large companies seem to have a natural urge to use Pando-Enterprise as their only System of Record to manage goods transportation. With more companies on board, this growing data set for shipments, orders, events, users and loading and unloading points, provides us with two unique opportunities:

1. With access to all transportation from, to and within an organisation and their clients, and information about vendors, loading and unloading points, trips, and trucks, contracts and materials, Pando will have all the data required to continuously visualise an entire organisation’s logistics operations digitally, and securely, for our clients.
2. With aggregate data available across different such clients, Pando will have the unique opportunity to help its clients cross-optimise across organisations, becoming a systemic network service provider. Such data will eventually aggregate to industry-wide data, that will be useful for industry bodies, government agencies etc.

Visualising such data through flexible dashboards, customised reports, and other innovative channels (we are experimenting with conversational interfaces!), and enabling optimisation through Pando’s proprietary algorithms (route optimisation, load optimisation, freight division across cost-centers etc.) will add significant value to our clients. We see this — the ability to help our clients make sense of data, and gain value from it, through a System of Intelligence— as Pando’s largest value proposition, as we go forward. For Team Pando, this promises to be a uniquely challenging, but deeply enriching experience.

Over the next few months, we will continue iterating the product for specific industries, as we push ahead with implementations for our anchor clients. We will forever be grateful to these clients, for their time, and trust. In return, we are super excited to help these companies restart their quest, and help other companies kickstart their journey into this new connected economy, through our products. We are taking a huge chunk of worry, cost and time, out of their plates, so companies of all sizes can delight their customers, one delivery at a time.

At Pando, we are building the future of deliveries. And, as our clients like to say, The Future of Deliveries is Digital™