Providing the perfect customer experience is one of the vital aims of businesses these days. This is why organizations are leaning towards intelligent solutions for help.  FarEye empowers companies to orchestrate, track and optimize their logistics operations. Its Intelligent Delivery Management Platform enables all types of businesses, including B2C brands in food, grocery, furniture, pharmacy, and carriers, to provide great customer experiences while optimizing last-mile deliveries, reducing operational costs. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Kushal Nahata, CEO & Co-founder, FarEye.

• Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that FarEye offers.

FarEye empowers companies to orchestrate, track and optimize their logistics operations. Its Intelligent Delivery Management Platform enables all types of businesses, including B2C brands in food, grocery, furniture, pharmacy, and carriers, to provide great customer experiences while optimizing last-mile deliveries, reducing operational costs.

The company's low-code approach offers an environment to develop applications with a quick turnaround and minimal code to shorten the "concept to ship" cycle.  The delivery management software leverages millions of data points for predictive visibility that helps make deliveries better for everyone. FarEye is a leader in last-mile technologies and has featured in Gartner's Market Guide for 'Vehicle Routing and Scheduling and Last-mile Delivery Technologies' for the past four years.

• Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognitions, and clients' feedback that you feel are notable and valuable for the company. 

FarEye has received numerous accolades for its services over the years, including:

• Recognized as a Representative Vendor in Gartner Market Guide for 'Vehicle Routing and Scheduling and Last-Mile Technologies' for four consecutive years. The latest Market Guide was published on 13 December 2021.
• Recognized as a Challenger in the first-ever Gartner 'Magic Quadrant For Real-Time Visibility Platforms'.
• Named to the CB Insights Retail Tech 100 List of the 'Most Innovative B2B Tech Companies'.
• Certified as a 'Great Place to Work' three times in a row.

• Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/AI/Big Data Analytics/Robotics/Self-Driving Vehicles/Cloud Computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting the clients. 

FarEye's AI-based real-time routing capabilities enable businesses to make faster on-time deliveries. Through AI-based operations, firms get an opportunity to reduce empty miles such as eliminating vehicle idling time and optimizing delivery executives' productivity by allocating efficient routes. FarEye enables enterprises to distribute delivery capacity across their fleet and effectively allocate loads to improve delivery efficiency.

FarEye's in-plant logistics optimization process is driven by IoT devices like sensors that work in tandem with compliance applications to identify irregularities and restrict vehicle entry and movement within a plant. For instance, FarEye enabled Tata Steel plant managers to execute supply chain operations effectively by accurately predicting on-time deliveries and deliveries that will get delayed.

FarEye ensures millions of shipments of all kinds of items – pizza, medicines, surgery kits, furniture, parcels, tools, groceries – get optimized every day and reach customers through its flagship solutions – Intelligent Delivery Orchestration, Intelligent Delivery Visibility, and Intelligent Delivery Experience. FarEye enabled the world's largest pizza delivery chain to increase its fleet productivity by 200% and brought down delivery time by 27%. Another U.S.-based e-commerce company increased its on-time delivery by a whopping 96%.

• What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors? 

FarEye's unique low-code drag and drop Business Process Engine for customized workflow automation gives it a distinct competitive advantage over other players in the market. FarEye is a leader in providing last-mile planning and execution capabilities, advanced real-time visibility, and a unified post-purchase consumer experience.

FarEye's AI/ML capabilities apply field learnings to optimize processes, helping strapped delivery companies expand capacity during driver shortages. Its predictive platform helps enterprises prepare for supply chain hurdles and avoid late deliveries while improving consumer experience with 1-2 day shipping and real-time package visibility.

• How is IoT/Big Data/AI/Robotics evolving today in the industry as a whole?

From smartphone-based applications to GPS-enabled sensors on delivery vehicles, businesses are benefiting from IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) technologies to increase supply chain visibility and optimize logistics operations.

With rising complexity in global supply chains, mounting expectations of speedy delivery, and improved efficiencies between suppliers and business partners, the margin of error is rapidly shrinking. This increasing pressure underscores the urgent need to leverage ML

ML learns and cleanses addresses thus reducing delivery time. AI delivers a tremendous competitive edge by providing powerful optimization capabilities required for capacity planning, improved productivity, lower costs, and high-quality deliveries. AI also enables to optimize capacity planning, and productivity while minimizing costs.

The pandemic-led e-commerce boom has pushed logistics firms towards automation to meet the growing volume of shipments. The benefits of automation range from lower operational costs to reducing manual errors. With automation, repetitive tasks within a supply chain can be handled more efficiently.

• What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe? [2]

Digital Transformation: The pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of global supply chains and the need to make the supply chains more flexible and resilient via digital transformation. Digital transformation will have a direct impact on productivity, cost, and profitability. For example, leveraging analytics will allow companies to make more data-driven decisions. Real-time data can be used for predictive analytics that'll facilitate inventory management. Centralized data dashboards will provide actionable insights that can be used to improve supply chain management.

Sustainability: Rising regulations and the need to make businesses – and operations – more sustainable, have pushed companies to rethink their business models. In addition to this, COP26 brought the transportation and logistics industry—which contributes 17% to global greenhouse gas emissions—under the spotlight, further pressing the need for supply chain sustainability.

With technologies like AI-based real-time routing capabilities, dynamic route optimization, and loop optimization, enterprises can cut down the number of miles driven annually, minimizing their carbon emissions. Companies can also leverage drones and autonomous vehicles as alternate modes of delivery in the future.

Non-traditional fulfillment options: With the rise of the 15-min or hourly delivery trend in the e-commerce and food logistics world, non-traditional fulfillment options like dark stores and pop-up distribution centers have emerged as viable options to keep up with the rising demand.

Dark stores help in saving costs with one store in an area facilitating multiple online grocery delivery enterprises. Since dark stores are dedicated solely towards online fulfillment, they provide greater visibility into stock availability.

• What are your growth plans for the next 12 months? 

We are continuously expanding our global operations in the U.S., Europe, and Singapore with new offices and hiring at various levels. We recently announced our operations in the U.S. and Mexico, establishing Chicago as our North American headquarters.

We are scaling our engineering and product teams and plan to have more than 1,000 employees in the next 12 months. We've hired several industry veterans to build our core team, including CRO, Amit Bagga (Ex-President of APAC at Blue Yonder), and a CPO, Suvrat Joshi (former executive at Dropbox, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft), to strengthen its tech team, enrich culture and build scalable world-class products. Other key hires include Rajat Budhiraja (VP Professional Services, ex Nagarro), and CFO – Manoj Rathi (Genpact, Grofers, BirlaSoft).

We are focusing on specific sectors like courier express parcel, grocery, furniture, and e-commerce for business growth.

• What are some of the challenges faced by the industry today?    

There are several challenges that the supply chain and logistics industry faces today. These range from agility issues to more granular problems like labor and container shortages and a rise in shipping costs.

Agility and flexibility

In this era of instant gratification and demand for swift deliveries, supply chains are increasingly coming under pressure. Hourly and same-day deliveries have become a norm. There's a rising need for technologies that help retailers and logistics companies become more flexible, agile and keep pace with the ever-changing market dynamics.

Meeting customer expectations

One of the biggest challenges for the logistics industry is to effectively meet consumer expectations. Most companies – retailers and carriers – are still stuck with obsolete logistics practices that fail to provide full supply-chain visibility internally and last-mile visibility to the end consumer. These organizations do not have the tech prowess to meet the needs and expectations of the new-age online consumers. The logistics industry needs to embrace technologies like AI, ML, and automation to better serve its customers.

Sustainability

The growing concern over climate change and the rise of eco-conscious consumers has forced companies to take a hard look at their carbon footprint. The logistics industry needs to step up and take decisive action to meet climate change issues head-on. The industry must implement route optimization techniques, track and report emissions and shift to clean fuel.