A SmartShift for intra-city logistics

As a leading player in small commercial vehicles, Mahindra declared an onslaught on a fledgling space last year with a desire to leverage their strong understanding of intra-city goods movement. Staying true to their vision and word, one year hence, SmartShift has emerged as one of the leading players in the space in terms of transaction volume and collaborations, facilitating 1,200 transactions every day.

The team had conducted 2,000 hours of insight, mapping several industries' supply chains, end-to-end, until it became fairly obvious that the solution went beyond the supply of vehicles. "A suitable solution was in taking ownership of the entire delivery process so that the customer is assured and can solely focus on growing his business," said Kausalya Nandakumar, chief exexutive officer, SmartShift.

Launched last October, SmartShift is an aggregator for cargo owners and transporters, enabling them to work with each other. Cargo owners can access the SmartShift service through the mobile app (currently available on android), the website or the dedicated call centre. "Even today, almost 100% of adhoc transport still happens through truck stands or 'nakas'. Our entire focus has been to make the naka ecosystem digital and efficient," said Nandakumar.

The SME base that the company caters to spends nearly 30% of its daily working time arranging for logistics requirements - haggling over the price with multiple transporters. SmartShift had a brainwave - why not digitise this process of bargaining. That's how 'reverse bidding' was born. "As a system, we do not dictate or force prices. We give the choice to the customer to choose the transporter at the right price. What this also did was that it made the price of the trip known in advance, unlike the distance and traffic variability of others' models, which also helped us differentiate in the market," she said.

Reverse Bidding helped them create an attractive model on the transporter side as well. SmartShift celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit of the transporters, and gives them the autonomy that they desire in a smarter fashion. "On our platform, transporters decide their working hours, the right price for the cargo movement and may also decline a job if it does not suit their current conditions," she added.

This was, at the same time, crafted while being mindful of the fact that a 100% smartphone penetration among transporters is a utopian dream. So, instead of going around distributing smartphones, they built an easily accessible platform that caters to plain voice-enabled/feature phones as well. By leveraging a global-first technology platform that utilises tower triangulation (telecom towers' location tracking), SmartShift is the first and only player in the digital aggregation industry to have created a universal platform that any transporter can have access to. "This single strategy improved our universality and most importantly, created zero entry barriers to SmartShift," she said.

According to a report, the logistics industry in India is pegged at $130 billion, with 35% to 40% of it being in the intra-city space. It is also estimated that 18 lakh small commercial vehicles complete millions of transactions daily, across the country.

Clawing its way into this lucrative ecosystem, SmartShift services over 500 pin-codes in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Although focused on the SME's 'on-demand' market, they have diversified and emerged as the last-mile logistics partner of over 25 fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, e-commerce clients and logistics companies.

From the business point of view, SmartShift has witnessed an over 50% growth month-on-month since inception. It has successfully garnered over 10,000 stakeholders, and clocks approximately 1,200 transactions every day and is on course to open up in two more cities in the current financial year. Its next milestone is to create a community of 1 million stakeholders in three years.

Courtesy: YourStory.com