AI-powered delivery automation streamlined for the enterprise

The last two years saw a major rise in home deliveries. Around 60% of the global population will live in cities by 2030 and last-mile deliveries are expected to grow further by 78%, according to the World Economic Forum.

Currently, the global last-mile delivery market size stands at $130 billion, with 4160 parcels shipped every second. The number comes to about 150 billion annually — a number that is always rising owing to ecommerce growth and changing consumer behavior — according to Pitney Bowes’ Parcel Shipping Index. All major organizations like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walmart and UPS are investing heavily to focus on home deliveries and provide the best digital delivery experience.

Today, it’s possible to order everything online and companies have to be prepared to fulfill these customer demands. Both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) shipments have grown significantly, and customers expect the best delivery experience.

LogiNext, a New York-based technology logistics automation company for large enterprises, claims its proprietary artificial intelligence (AI)-powered logistics management solutions provide a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solution to help enterprises digitize, optimize and automate end-to-end logistics operations. With predictive ETAs, the platform kicks into action even before a consumer places an order online and helps a brand orchestrate deliveries until it reaches the doorstep (including handling returns).

Dhruvil Sanghvi, CEO at LogiNext, told VentureBeat that LogiNext’s platform has tracked more than 13 billion location data points, supporting and processing more than 500 million orders annually. According to Sanghvi, LogiNext’s platform enables clients to deliver faster, more efficiently — offering clear-cut insights into the best possible routes for drivers and giving real-time visibility over the entire logistical operations.

Challenges around home delivery

Sanghvi noted that traditional brands aiming to offer home deliveries like digital natives have a few hurdles to cross.

1. Lack of digitization: Several large organizations have logistics operations heavily dependent on manual tasks. Digitizing processes from inventory management to collecting e-signatures to analytics and reporting is critical for smooth home delivery operations.

2. Legacy technology systems: While many companies use some technology, they are often legacy on-premise systems that are expensive to install and maintain. New age SaaS platforms can easily replace legacy systems and give operations managers a great digital experience to manage deliveries.

3. Driver management: There are orders coming in from several channels, and organizations rely on in-house drivers or a third-party fleet. Managing all of this on Excel sheets is highly inefficient and leads to increasing delivery costs.

Deliver smart, deliver fast

Sanghvi said what LogiNext does is heavy on artificial intelligence (AI). The SaaS platform helps enterprises deliver in a smarter manner and, hence, faster.

“For our algorithm to assign orders and figure out the best routes automatically, it must consider things like traffic patterns, weather conditions, transport regulations, peak hours, customer preference and several other variables,” he said.

To help enterprises optimize logistics, LogiNext’s AI and ML capabilities are helpful for route optimization, capacity utilization, dynamic order allocation and visibility over the entire supply chain.

“One of the foremost advantages of using LogiNext is digitization. There are still a lot of manual processes in the logistics industry which first need to get digitized and then move towards automation. The more historic and current data we have, the more we’re able to use AI to optimize logistics delivery,” he said.

According to Sanghvi, home deliveries for food and beverage (F&B), retail, ecommerce and courier companies are the largest segments adopting logistics automation to make last mile deliveries more efficient.

Prioritizing automation is critical to digital transformation

One of the major challenges in the enterprise ecosystem today is unstructured data. Sanghvi said many supply chain companies still handle a lot of their processes manually, collecting data in Excel sheets — making it difficult to contextualize data. He said LogiNext helps to digitize companies’ entire systems to ensure they are collecting, labeling and using data in the best possible way.

To achieve true success in their digital transformation journey, Sanghvi said organizations must prioritize automation, making processes more efficient. Logistics has a huge scope for this.

“Digital transformation and automating processes are two huge impact areas we help companies with,” said Sanghvi who highlighted how one of LogiNext’s major customers in North America reduced the order life cycle of a product from 12 hours to 2.2 hours.

Key differentiators

While Sanghvi considers the likes of Project 44 and Bringg as LogiNext’s major competitors, he said LogiNext has a differentiator in the fact that it is an end-to-end platform with elements of visibility and routing. With 100+ out-of-the-box API integrations, companies can plug and play to go live quickly, as they don’t need to revamp any of their existing technology. The LogiNext platform sits smoothly over any existing technology through the APIs and webhooks.

He said another differentiator is LogiNext’s ability to provide end user’s with a superior customer experience where the end customer is communicated ETAs in real time with contextual alerts & notifications.

“A lot of our competitors often focus on one particular thing — either they focus only on visibility or only on routing. We focus on all aspects of the delivery process, from the first mile to the last mile. So, you can think of us more as horizontal players rather than vertical players,” said Sanghvi.

More on LogiNext

Founded in 2014 by CEO Dhruvil Sanghvi, LogiNext is headquartered in New York, with the company’s founding team and business development teams in New Jersey. While LogiNext’s engineering and research teams are based in Mumbai, the company has small offices in Jakarta, Singapore and Dubai.

Growing at 120% year-over-year and with a valuation of between $300-$500 million, LogiNext says it aims to go for its initial public offering (IPO) in the next five to seven years, building a global company with cutting-edge tech for logistics, especially in the home delivery and last-mile segment.

LogiNext has a current headcount of about 200 and has raised $49.5 million in total funding to date from investors like Tiger Global, Steadview Capital and Alibaba group of companies. The company currently serves 200+ enterprise clients in over 50 countries globally, including companies like McDonald’s, KFC, BurgerKing, Decathlon, SingaporePost, among others.

Sanghvi said LogiNext provides its software to companies who want to compete with Amazon on their delivery experience. The company has been named a sample vendor in Gartner’s Hype Cycle on many occasions, and also received Frost and Sullivan’s 2022 Customer Value Leadership Award.