Logistics Leaders share critical insights on Driving Sustainable, Cost-efficient, and Customer-centric Operations

Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Shipsy’s highly-anticipated virtual logistics tech summit on navigating ‘The Road to Sustainable and Cost-efficient Logistics’ concluded on a high note. The second in the Limitless series, the flagship event has witnessed the participation of many industry stalwarts from marquee organisations and 1000+ supply chain professionals worldwide to date.

The Limitless Summit is an influential global gathering of leading logistics, supply chain, and operations professionals. It is an open forum for industry leaders to exchange ideas, learnings, best practices, and key trends that can drive and harness limitless opportunities in a rapidly evolving logistics ecosystem.

The latest edition touched upon how the environment and business profitability can go hand-in-hand. Nations across the globe are making significant efforts toward decarbonising their supply chains. But with reports necessitating the region to slash its CO2 emissions by 42% to meet the 2030 target, companies must leverage advanced solutions to reduce their carbon footprint.

Soham Chokshi, CEO & Co-founder of Shipsy, shed light on how technology can play a pivotal role in increasing logistical efficiencies. He said, “Dynamic order planning, reducing the distance travelled, increasing usage of carriers, optimising territory planning, and seamless communication between riders and consumers will empower businesses to reduce CO2 emissions. Data will play a critical enabler here. Sustainability dashboards will help businesses monitor their carbon footprint before the shipment journey commences and select the right logistics partner.”

Chokshi also unveiled Shipsy Business Intelligence (BI) — an intuitive tool that helps businesses with real-time, data-driven logistics intelligence. Logistics leaders can leverage customisable dashboards to compare multiple metrics to track and reduce infringement at each stage of their logistics value chain.

The industry keynote by Ekhlaque Bari, Chief Information Officer at Jubilant FoodWorks, shared key drivers to boosting customer experiences. He also highlighted that customer experience is intricately linked to profitability and sustainability.

Bari said, “Businesses must always keep product quality, price, behaviour, trust, effort, and turnaround time in check. Poor quality products/services, inability to arrest mock rider locations, and non-adherence of delivery SLAs, among other factors, worsen customer experiences. Providing too many variants for the same product can negatively impact buying decisions. Fair pricing is important, and to ensure businesses charge the right price, they must identify cost optimisation pockets like improved route planning.”

In a panel discussion moderated by Vohuman Bardi, Vice President – EMEA & APAC, Shipsy, the panellists delved deeper into how businesses can strike a balance between environmental sustainability and logistics costs.

Walid Shabana, CTO & Co-founder of Rabbit Mart, said, “Sustainability is all about protecting and preserving natural resources. Our organisation aims to reduce waste from the grocery (fresh produce) and minimise hoarding by taking the product faster to the customers. We built our business model on dark stores to reduce the distance travelled and serve select geography with limited resources.”

“Establishing sustainability metrics helps define processes, make frameworks, and set accountabilities. Furthermore, embracing best practices such as optimum average vehicle speed and leveraging technology for optimising routes and improving capacity utilisation can help achieve efficiencies in logistics,” said Santosh Abbimane, Group Chief Financial & Transformation Officer, DTDC.

Bassel El Koussa, CEO & Co-founder of Quiqup, said, “Major inefficiencies and CO2 emissions occur in the final mile. We aim to make last-mile routes more productive and efficient, bringing pickup points closer to lower travel times to reduce carbon emissions. Making unit economics of the on-demand delivery model work necessitates embracing advanced technologies. It will help businesses to shorten the distance travelled and maximise resource utilisation.”

Gaurav Arora, Vice President – Strategy & Operations, Ferns N Petals, said, “Customers are becoming sensitive when it comes to sustainability, so the effort needs to be deeply integrated across an organisation and the community. For instance, a vehicle mobility company in India has deployed an all-electric fleet. Customers using their service are informed of the total emissions they have saved. So, the conversations gradually move from “companies saving costs” to “companies reducing carbon emissions.”

To catch all that happened at the second edition of Limitless 2022, register to receive the session recordings to view at your convenience.