Case Study
Makro's first-ever automated dispatch in 37 years of logistics.
Saving 16.7% in logistics cost. $1.2M back. 13.8M orders now dispatched by agents on the world's first agentic TMS.
Segment & Geography
- Industry: Wholesale & Retail. Online-to-Offline (O2O) commerce.
- Region: Thailand, with active expansion into 4 more countries.
Objectives
- Reach autonomous, end-to-end order-to-dispatch
- Lift rider productivity without scaling planning headcount
- Hold delivery promises as O2O order volume doubled year over year
Locus Solutions Implemented
- Automated, continuous wave-based dispatch planning and routing across every store
- Capacity-aware slot grouping and order promising at the store level
- Live ETA and tracking embedded inside the customer app
- Digital audit trail on cash-on-delivery settlement
Impact
reduction in logistics cost
(~$1.2M saved)
faster dispatch (2 hours to under 30 minutes per store)
more orders per rider, per day
(10–15 to 18–20)
order volume absorbed in 12 months (6.4M to 13.8M)
“We needed a partner who could scale with our growth, and Locus delivered. We grew from 500 to 4,000 trucks, while Locus enabled a nationwide rollout in just six months and boosted fleet efficiency by 24%.”
Last-Mile Logistics & Supply Chain Transformation,
Siam Makro
Client Overview
CP Axtra Public Company Limited (Siam Makro and Lotus's) is the largest B2B Online-to-Offline (O2O) retailer in Asia, with $14.6B in annual revenue and 160+ stores across Thailand. The business was built over 37 years for in-store wholesale, with planning and dispatch run by hand. When digital order volume started doubling year over year, that operating model ran out of room. Makro chose Locus, the world's first agentic TMS, to rebuild the decision layer underneath, with one stated goal: an autonomous, end-to-end order-to-dispatch chain.
Business Challenges
- Manual dispatch capped profitability. Two hours of human planning per store, per day, across 160+ stores. Riders averaged 10 to 15 orders a day, well below the network's real capacity. Every additional store and every additional rider added planning load, not throughput. Human capacity, not network capacity, was the ceiling.
- Digital demand outpaced the operating model. Customers stopped rewarding proximity to a store. They rewarded speed, slot reliability, and convenience. A wholesale-first network wasn't built for that, and static zone logic couldn't keep up with dynamic online order flows.
- Operations ran without a system that could make decisions. Store dispatch, picking, and delivery sat in disconnected tools, with no real-time view across the chain. Without live data, decisions like what to dispatch, what to promise, when to escalate were made by hand. Many were never made at all. Planners flew blind, and customers got an ETA that was a guess.
Solutions Implemented
Locus deployed agentic decisioning into the Makro network. Agents and algorithms reason on live signals, act within Makro-defined policy, and learn from every delivery. Humans set the policy and govern the exceptions.
-
Agents took over dispatch.
Agents and algorithms now run continuous, wave-based dispatch planning across every store, with 30-minute incrementals, multi-trip routing, and constraint-aware execution against 250+ real-world rules (customer slot windows, task and tour tardiness, max orders per trip, rider skills, shift priorities, route compactness, U-turn restrictions, fairness across riders). The two-hour manual planning cycle is gone. Planners moved from clicking through every dispatch to setting policy and reviewing exceptions. Compliance is enforced in the same loop: task sequence adherence, POD image capture at the right location, and auto-end-trip rules are structural, not supervisory. -
Capacity flexed with demand instead of being reset by hand.
Agentic capacity planning handles slot grouping, slot windows, and capacity-aware order promising at the store level. As O2O demand patterns shifted across regions and seasons, the model adjusted within Makro-defined limits, instead of waiting for a planner to reconfigure zones manually. Static zone logic gave way to dynamic, sublocality-based zoning under Makro's policy. -
One system, deciding end-to-end on live signals.
Locus owns the customer-facing delivery promise. Locus's tracking link and live ETA are embedded directly in Makro's MPro customer app, so the promise the system computes is the promise the customer sees, with live updates and exception handling on every order. Digital settlement closes the loop on cash-on-delivery: riders collect payment via TrueMoney and QR through Payment 2.0, with a full audit trail on every recomputation. Order to dispatch to delivery to settlement, the chain runs as one system that decides.
The Results
People
Planners stopped making dispatch decisions and started governing them.
- The rider network grew from 8.2K to 10.9K active riders, absorbed by the existing planning team
- Thirty-seven years of dispatch judgment, once living in operator heads, now sits in the system as configured policy and learned behaviour
Resource
The same network started doing more, faster, with the same hands.
- Dispatch time per store: 2 hours to under 30 minutes
- Orders per rider per day: 10 to 15, now 18 to 20
- SLA achievement: under 85%, now 86%+ (32% of stores exceed 90%)
- Order volume absorbed: 6.4M in 2024 to 13.8M in 2025, on track for 27M in 2026
Cost
Savings landed in the first cohort and compounded as more stores went live.
- 16.7% reduction in logistics cost, around $1.2M saved
- 150 stores rolled out in 3 months
- Makro and Locus continue to roll out the agentic platform across the CP Axtra group's banners and markets in Southeast Asia
Impactful Enterprise Stories: 360+ and Expanding
99.5% SLA Adherence for Leading E-Grocery Platform
100% Order-Fulfillment Visibility for Fashion E-com
34% Distance Reduction for PT. Tigaraksa Satria
Frozen Dessert Maker Saves 2-3 Hours Daily on Planning
Know More About LOCUS Services?
Schedule a demo with one of our industry experts