Logistics sector focuses on technology

Hyderabad: Whether it is helping governments for seamless vaccine delivery or providing technological support for on-ground trucks, companies working in the logistics space are pivoting and holding ground during the pandemic period.

While BlueDart formed a consortium to provide vaccine and medical supplies through drones under the Medicine from the Sky project in collaboration with Government of Telangana, World Economic Forum, Niti Aayog and Healthnet Global, Hyderabad-based startup WhistleDrive pivoted itself from being an employee transportation provider to providing trucks to e-commerce players by on-boarding local and hyper-local fleet service providers.

Rakesh Munnanooru, founder, WhistleDrive, said, “Right after the first lockdown, many e-commerce players started investing heavily and in the last eight months we are witnessing full recovery happening in terms of revenue. Technology platforms like ours are playing a key role in the logistics sector and it is helping them stabilise not just the national market but also concentrate on the local and hyper-local delivery segment.”

K Satyanarayana, co-founder and director, Ecom Express Private Limited, said, “The pandemic has fundamentally changed the market and the way Indian companies operate. In just a few months of the pandemic, the entire retail model changed from a large shopping mall and e-commerce to a hyper-local business entity. The period provided us with new growth opportunities, including initiating hyper-local service.”

Both Satyanarayana and Munnanooru believed that compared with last year, this year the companies are better prepared than before and have also geared up teams at a local level to work accordingly. “Predictability and supply chain efficiency has become the focus for the logistics companies and that is where technology has become more of a need than a luxury,” said Munnanooru.

Balfour Manuel, managing director, Blue Dart said in a statement, “The pandemic has taught each one of us the importance of logistics and the need for a tech-led supply chain infrastructure. While we reach out to over 35,000 locations across the country, the current situation calls for much deeper penetration of vaccines.”

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