Why SaaS-based visibility solutions will drive greater business value

According to Statista (“The Growing Weight of Amazon's Logistics Costs”), the share of fulfillment and shipping costs as a percentage of sales for Amazon increased from 16.2% in 2008 to 26.5% in 2018. Isn’t it counterintuitive that supply chain costs have gone up, instead of going down with economies of scale? While we all cherish the same day delivery seamless experience, the improved service levels of delivery has led to higher costs for all players in the supply chain ecosystem.

Retailers, big-box players, grocery chains and hyperlocal businesses all have seen multi-fold rise in their volumes during and post pandemic, globally. Procter & Gamble posted its best organic sales growth since 2005. Digitalization has led to a phenomenon where the supply chain resilience and logistics have taken center stage of all discussions happening in and around board rooms. Moreover, with companies like Alibaba having ambitions of reaching any part of China within 24 hours, this fight to make the fulfillment delivery experience quick and flawless is going to get even tougher and expensive for all players in the ecosystem.

As businesses compete to create Amazon-like delivery experience, technology has come out as one of the most important factors to empower the intelligent supply chains, globally. While automation and technology has been implemented widely across warehouses and manufacturing plants since more than the past two decades, one critical piece of the supply chain where technology investments haven’t happened at such a huge scale is transportation and logistics at large.

SaaS based solution providers are making their mark by providing end-to-end visibility and delivery execution intelligence. What used to be a black-box for most of the shippers, once shipment used to leave their warehouse/depots, has been made not just visible, but also predictable, prescriptive and hence controllable for the shippers. This has led to significant improvements in the delivery and overall customer experience.

Intelligent routing, proactive customer communication, driver management and support, digital control towers, customized alerts, prescriptive analytics, flawless delivery experience are some of the key advantages that have become the core value being offered by such visibility and last-mile SAAS solution providers.

At FarEye, for one of our global retail clients, we implemented our last-mile execution and visibility solution, which has helped our client improve its core KPI metrics like:

1. On-Time delivery rates by 24%
2. ETA accuracy from more than 3 days to less than 2 hours
3. Helped scale operations by handling 300% increase in the order volumes during COVID-19

Leaders investing in FarEye’s real-time visibility and delivery solutions have been able to realize return on investments within months. All of this has happened while optimizing costs and delivering amazing, transparent and scalable experience for customers, vendors and all other stakeholders in the supply chain ecosystem.

While the world leapfrogs technology revolution in all industries and segments due to the current situation and disrupted supply chains, SAAS-based visibility and last-mile execution solutions are going to help shippers battle competition by ensuring greater control, intelligence and predictability across supply chain operations.