A consort to freight forwarding sector
Purnendu Shekhar, Founder, CogoPort, shares how his freight forwarding venture aims to bring efficiency in the archaic industry of freight forwarding through the significant usage of data and technology.
What was the inspiration behind the inception of CogoPort?
The main driver was the disjointed way the freight industry does business and the predominance of outdated, analog systems. Here, the inefficiency is largely by design-opacity with the assumptions of making more profits albeit which has made lakhs of organisation sub optimal. We have witnessed business built on transparency and efficiency. Even being in the industry ecosystem for 22 odd years, I always had the feeling of not really being part of the sub-set large umbrella of logistics. An inquisitiveness gave birth to several of projects. Good or bad, the relentlessness of top MNCs to challenge the existing set of frameworks in the ecosystem was the core to start Cogoport.
Elaborate the hiccups in moving the goods from one part of the world to another?
There is a need of visibility solution, through which one can instantly get a complete view of shipment information all in one place. Transparency around the rates are not available which is ripping the small and medium customers. Below stated are the major inabilities in moving the goods from one part of the world to another:
Managing numerous logistics stakeholders
Lack of availability of instant freight charges
No visibility over the prices or the price trend
No analytics to assist planning & Vendor Review Customs procedures Documentation No access to shipment status events
Which areas are being ignored in the technology front?
For starters, a customer does not have a one stop marketplace to view shipping options, compare prices and book a shipment. They have to go to multiple websites to accomplish this task wherein many processes are still manually driven. The legacy way of working is still rampant in shipping. There are many laws and documents that are obsolete and archaic which can be made redundant with the use of technology. Slowly and steadily, a lot of process have been automated but the road ahead is long and tedious, but, not impossible.
For instance, visibility and milestone updates are available on food-apps and several such e-commerce applications with technology advancements but when it comes to shipments of goods worth millions of dollars one has to be dependent on several stakeholders. There is a huge gap of technology in this field which we are trying to make an honest attempt to fulfill it.
What is your USP?
What truly sets us apart is about our customer centricity. To do this comes the enablement of technology and core mission to decentralise things for efficiency and use available resources in the ecosystem for best use of customers. Our team is a blend of industry experience and technology. We are not focussed on margins at this moment, we want to achieve scale and then we will trigger our revenue streams which will be largely from our suppliers’ commission, commission from banks and other financial institution.
What kind of system is required to iron out efficiencies and achieve a 20 per cent reduction in the logistics cost?
It is no longer about wanting the data but needing the data. A recent Aberdeen study on the global supply chain found that data and information is critical to growing operations and complexity. There is a need to improve supply chain operational speed and accuracy. Today’s customers do not view improvements to visibility as an ornamental addition– but rather a business imperative.
A platform’s complex algorithm takes millions of line items - prices, transit times, vessel details for one lakh port pairs, across the world
A platform’s complex algorithm which takes millions of line items prices, transit times, vessel details for one lakh port pairs, across the world and hundreds of suppliers, runs through distributed computing models and displays best freight rates in the personalised dashboard of an importer and exporter to book in a single click. After the shipment is booked, the operations dashboard allows customers to track the shipments and also provides numerous analytics around that particular shipment.
We believe in democratisation of freight and services and removing information asymmetry and rising above price arbitrage and truly believing in synchronous integrated logistics. There are a lot of non-contributing players adding to the overall logistics cost. These players need to be eliminated. Large MNCs want transparency and small organisations need price benefit and we believe we have a perfect value proposition for both.