Hyper local Delivery - R R Padmanabhan, Director - Exim Academy

 Hyper local Delivery

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These are Corona times.  People are under extended periods of lock down with no certainty about of lifting such restrictions on free movement.  But can life be ground to a halt?  Certainly, not and life has to go on.  People need essentials like medicines, groceries and other things that make their lives as usual as possible.  Increasingly, people were becoming used to online shopping by choice but now by default they have to. 

How, Logistics industry raise to these challenges is a very interesting question.  Logistics companies used to work with e-commerce companies on Hub and spoke model.  E Commerce giants like Amazon, Flip kart and Grocer etc maintain large warehouses in tier I and tier 2 cities but usually within 40 to 50 kilometer of these large cities.  The moment an order lands in the website, the order is diverted to the warehouse, from where the logistics companies pick up the consignments and deliver them to the consumers.  This is the usual model but before the Corona.  It is no longer the no normal. 

Few days’ back, I had an interesting experience!  I searched a famous website to order a transistor.  One of the ways of time pass, what to do?  After going through the essential 2 steps out of 3, I got the message that service to my place of residence is withheld at the moment.  A bit of disappointment of course, but undeterred by this experience I tried some other shopping website.  This time it is some other product specific shopping website.  Same process, I went through and this-time the 3 essential step of payment also gone through!  Alas!  I got the feedback that my product would be delivered within next 5 days!  Still it was a sort of disappointment but I thought patience to be a virtue. 

In another 48 hours, I got message from the seller that my product would be delivered within 2 days. That is a day shorter than what they promised.  A case of under promise and over performance, I thought.  The very next day, I got a SMS from the courier company that my product is out for delivery and that would be a contactless delivery! 

True to their promise my product was delivered within the time as per the message and of course, the delivery was absolutely contactless! 

But I pondered over the whole episode! While one e commerce website could not manage delivery to my place, the other could do it, how?  The answer to this question is Hyper Local Delivery.  The method works like this.  As soon as order is received, it does not activate the warehouse.  On the contrary, search is made to find a vendor who lives in the place where the consumer lives.  Once that is found out, a communication is sent to both the vendor and the courier company.  The courier company picks up the product from the local vendor and delivers to the consumer.

R R Padmanabhan,

Director - Exim Academy



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