Locus for Retail: Improve CX and Logistics Operations with Actionable Insights

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”
~ Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research at Gartner, Inc.

Retail companies tend to house millions upon millions of data. This is no surprise, considering recent studies indicate that the number of online shoppers globally has surged to 2.71 billion, propelling retail sales to an estimated $30.5 trillion in 2024, with projections reaching $32 trillion by 2026.

The vast revenue generated from customers worldwide corresponds to an enormous amount of data circulating within the retail industry. However, customer data is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to enhancing business performance.

Retailers frequently face challenges in delivering orders on time due to various on-ground issues. To address these problems, many have turned to solutions like route optimization and capacity planning. Yet, without offering actionable insights for logistics managers, these tools fall short. Effective solutions must help businesses to understand their customers and deliver value and drive growth.

Beyond Data Collection: The Critical Need for Insights

Process/department like supply chain, finance, marketing, etc, all require data to make decisions. However, it’s the insights derived from that data that help you drive value. With that in mind, let’s look at how an absence of smart analytics can hinder business operations and performance of the retailers:

• No way to optimize for business and location analytics: Shippers’ aren’t able to improve delivery in a location which could lead to poor customer experience.
  
  With each delivery, shippers acquire data points like fuel consumed, CO2 emission, SLA, time of delivery, cost per delivery, planned vs executed deliveries, distance traveled, route density, average drift per order and many others. Yet, there is no way to derive actionable insights for these metrics without manually spending weeks or months on this.
  
• No customized reports: It’s already a herculean task for supply chain teams to provide insights from the raw data. But to also make them customizable for senior management and other teams is quite a challenge. Without custom reports, logistics planners can’t track carrier performance, which can increase carrier cost and delivery performance.
  
• Zero visibility for stakeholders: Due to lack of automation in the reporting process, relevant stakeholders are kept in the dark until manual intervention. This then creates data silos and ultimately affects decision making across the organization.
  
• No forecasting and Natural Language Query (NLQ) features: Excel sheets and outdated systems don’t have data forecasting functions to help planners make data driven decisions. Another issue with legacy systems is that NLQ functions aren’t available, causing non-data folks to scramble to get the insight or information they are looking for.
  
• No performance leaderboard: Every business requires insight into what their team/team members are doing and how they are contributing to the organization. Without the leaderboard data, inefficiencies can’t be caught and processes can’t be improved.

It is an irrefutable fact that retailers need smart analytics systems to power their supply chain and logistics operations for excellence. Integrating a premium analytics solution into your existing logistics system is no longer a choice but a necessity.

Advanced Analytics in Supply Chain and Logistics

Technology, much like evolution, has gradually proven its indispensable value to the world. Logistics tech has evolved over the years and is currently capable of a multitude of things to help retailers deliver value to their customers while boosting the bottom line. Data analytics for logistics is one of those advancements. An AI-driven Order to Delivery platform like Locus can:

• Optimize Insights for 250+ operational metrics: With Locus’ smart analytics module, retailers can pull insights seamlessly for multiple operational metrics like SLA, CO2 emission, fuel consumption, planned and executed orders, route density etc. Shippers can also get clear insight into where the optimization is required to boost performance and improve customer experience.

• Optimize delivery for location: With Location analytics, dispatch managers can analyze order density, SLA and other metrics to optimize delivery experience for a specific location or area.

• Provide customized dashboards: Built-in analytics tools can create a custom dashboard by allowing users to add filters and fields for granular analytics to identify bottlenecks and improve performance. Furthermore, data as far back as 2 years can be pulled and populated on the dashboard to compare YOY performance.

• Keep stakeholders informed at all times: Automated reports tailored to stakeholders, teams and business units delivered to their inbox on a monthly, weekly and biweekly intervals for better monitoring and decision making.

• Forecast for better business outcomes: With Locus’ smart analytics, users can forecast future value with historical data. This can be done by changing any particular metric like cost, fuel consumption to see how it affects the current data. Supply chain and logistics teams can leverage this to align themselves with overall financial goals of the business.

• Improve UX with Natural Language Query (NLQ): Not every user of the dashboard or platform is analytics savvy. With Locus, any user with access to the dashboard need not worry about adding complex formulas or codes to get the insight, they just have to ask the query in plain English.

• Leaderboard data to improve productivity and performance: Leverage leaderboard data to push stakeholders and teams to solve for inefficiencies and drive innovation.

• Provide flexible subscription plans: Locus provides flexible subscription plans for its analytics solution. Most vendors in the market don’t provide custom subscription plans, forcing companies to opt and pay for features that aren’t part of their business needs. With Locus, supply chain teams can pick the plan that best fits their business needs while saving on cost.

Insights are essential for supply chain leaders to drive revenue and boost customer experience. However, actionable insights can be gained only by leveraging battle tested platforms like Locus.

Why Trust Locus

Our journey towards making supply chain and logistics a seamless experience for companies started almost a decade ago. With our constantly evolving tech along with dedicated domain experts, we have powered billions of deliveries across the globe for top brands like TATA, Landmark Group, and many more.

Flying blind can cost you dollars, customers experience and brand loyalty. A simple integration of Locus’ analytics solution can give you the much needed insight to show your customers you care about them. Book a demo to start your journey towards success.