As India faces its worst healthcare crisis in its 70-year existence as an independent nation, the dynamics of day-to-day life reflect a strange and unsettling reality. Terms like lockdown and "closedown" are commonplace. Last year, India witnessed its most stringent lockdown for two months. Since then, several cities and towns have gone into partial lockdowns and night curfews. These erratic but necessary measures to break the chain of transmission could have created serious implications in supply chain networks across India. But the use of technologies like AI have helped major e-tailers and e-commerce companies to continue serving customers. 

Locus.sh is one such company that came to the rescue of India's strained supply chain network last year when the pandemic upended normal life unexpectedly. Founded in 2015 by Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, former Amazon employees, Locus.sh is now one of India's top B2B logistics platform and works with industry leaders like Unilever, Myntra, Tata, Nestle and Big Basket among others. 

"A black swan event like the pandemic demonstrates the importance of agility in the supply chain. When COVID-19 hit, demand supply planners, procurement managers, supply chain analysts, ecommerce and warehousing specialists and other supply chain leaders at organizations around the world came together to assess how the pandemic was affecting the supply chain and make decisions on how to move forward. Lack of digital visibility hampered this effort for too many enterprises, explains Krishna Khandelwal, Chief Business Officer of Locus. 

When the lockdown was introduced last year, it was a critical time for Locus. The company's top clients, many of whom were involved in facilitating the sale of essential items and medical supplies, had to immediately change their operating models overnight to cater to the changing on-ground scenarios. Locus’ state-of-the-art platform, which is enterprise ready, immediately enabled clients to manage the new scale of orders and assist in implementing a whole new operating model. For example, Locus assigned deliveries only to riders who had the required permits and was also able to cordon off red-alert zones and ensured that deliveries were done using alternate routes. With slotted deliveries being tough to practically manage due to the on-ground scenario, several clients switched to the slotless delivery model - this meant that the clients could plan deliveries even a week in advance, while considering various factors. "We ensured that our clients were easily able to switch to contactless deliveries with E-PoD (Electronic Proof of Delivery) offering. Delivery personnel just had to upload a photo of the delivery instead of taking the client’s signature. We also helped clients try out various ‘what-if’ scenarios before locking in on a business decision," adds Khandelwal. 

Pandemic notwithstanding, customer expectations have drastically evolved and we're in the era of hyper personalisation and hyper convenience. A supply chain network, as is, has multiple moving parts that have to be managed with precision. The demand for personalisation and flexibility has made the task at hand more challenging. And this is where AI can be a game changer: 

Enhanced route planning and visibility: With delivery operations becoming dynamic and complex, businesses need AI to come up with a robust and comprehensive solution to plan daily delivery operations while considering all constraints like rider availability, traffic, customer-preferred delivery slots, etc. Real-time logistics tracking and visibility is of paramount importance for both the company and the end customers. AI can help with live tracking of fleet, predictive alerts, en route analytics, and workforce performance. Live tracking also provides details like the current latitude and longitude, ETA, contact details of customer care and the delivery executive, making it easy to share real-time details of orders with customers. The end goal is to reduce costs and enhance customer experience. 

Strategic Warehousing & Distribution: With customer experience becoming the only differentiator between brands, supply chain and logistics is now at the centre of every company’s vision for the present and future. A critical part of this vision is to come up with the right network design and distribution strategy. AI can help streamline this end-to-end by playing a crucial role across four categories of physical flow of goods, location intelligence, inventory optimisation and strategic sourcing

Warehousing and inventory management: Once a labor-intensive ‘pen and paper’ activity, is now turning into a digital operation. Using AI one can build a digital twin, a virtual copy of your on-ground supply chain, and tinker with it to test various scenarios. Also, companies can try out various ‘what-ifs’ to see how a business decision can impact their supply chain. Say, what if I place my new warehouse in location A as compared to location B. There is also increasing usage of robots in warehouses to pick up goods and redistribute them.  

This is how Locus is leveraging AI to build the most cutting edge logistics applications

• Locus DispatchIQ™: Sits on top of a conventional supply chain solution to supercharge operations by bringing in dynamic delivery planning, leveraging the powers of artificial intelligence and machine learning across each step of the process. DispatchIQ™ is an end-to-end intelligence solution that powers real-world decision-making right from cleansing addresses, maintaining master data, generating and editing routes, and dispatching the fleet on-ground. 
• Locus TrackIQ™: AI-powered control tower module that displays where each element of the fleet currently is, where it has been, and where it is expected to be in the future. It also provides automated fleet decisions in case of any variations - expected or unexpected. Locus TrackIQ™ has three modules — LiveView Dashboard, Locus-On-The-Road Mobile Application, & via.sh customer tracking links. These tracking links enable both the brand and its customers to have complete real-time visibility throughout the supply chain.
• Locus Orchestration: A flex-capacity delivery platform built on top of an intelligent rule engine to push and track orders across a network of carriers dynamically. It enables ideal carrier selection based on business rules, carrier availability, and contract level configurations. Orchestration is an intelligent platform that powers carrier & order management, getting real-time delivery quotes, automating order allocation based on pre-defined business rules, along with an AI-powered control tower module to get real-time visibility of every shipment.
• Locus NodeIQ: AI-powered decision-making platform that delivers intelligence across the entire supply chain. Locus NodeIQ performs end-to-end network and inventory optimization, thereby powering companies to resolve deep-lying supply chain inefficiencies.
• Locus FleetMix: Atrategic planning tool that leverages historical execution data and demand trends to propose comprehensive fleet mix plans for your business needs while modeling various ‘what-if’ scenarios.
• Locus AccuPin: High utility geocoding engine for all your address verification and validation needs. 
• Locus FieldIQ: An intelligent platform that uses artificial intelligence to help companies with their services and retail fulfillment operations. The solutions that companies can avail from FieldPro are permanent journey planning, permanent dispatch planning, and territory planning.

"Logistics is a constantly evolving and changing market space for all businesses, incidents like COVID, Suez Canal blockage have a huge impact on supply chain all around the world. With the increasing dynamism in the market, where a business can only survive if they are equipped to handle such unpredictable situations, logistics technology comes to rescue," adds Khandelwal. 

There is no immediate end in sight to COVID19. It has already disrupted industries and accelerated technology adoption multi-fold. As the pandemic evolves and alters global business dynamics, Khandelwal believes competitive advantage, contactless delivery and ever-changing customer expectations will define the logistics tech industry for the foreseeable future in India. "With this market increased competition, logistics is the key differentiating factor. Adopting logistics tech has given businesses a competitive advantage - the ability to ace the last mile delivery and meet the customer demands."