AUTOMATION FOCUS WITH GAUTAM KUMAR, COO & CO-FOUNDER, FAREYE
What’s your outlook for automation in the GCC?
The need to scale operations, ensure faster go-to-market and reduce OPEX will drive businesses across industries to embrace automation. The adoption of automation and its impact greatly varies across industries; however, its potential in sectors that are heavily dependent on routine tasks is immense. Therefore, with regards to supply chain, industries like manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing, automation will have a signilcant impact. According to a research, in GCC and UAE, technical automation potential is greater than 50 percent.
What’s driving interest in automation?
The need to track a large number of delivery force, scale delivery operations, plan eflcient routes, ensure compliance, accurately predict ETAs and mitigate risks will drive business in the Middle East to embrace automation.
In addition, the world of supply chain is broken down into many silos. Executing a delivery entails involvement of multiple stakeholders like a retailer’s own delivery arm, outsourced or third party logistics providers, warehouse management providers, independent truckers and so on. This fragmentation results in a lack of customer visibility, ineflcient accountability of shipment ownership, inaccurate delivery KPIs and signilcant loss of information. Trying to manage all these manually and then trying to integrate these seamlessly into a supply chain is almost impossible. Therefore, there is an urgent need to automate these processes to build a robust supply chain.
What new projects are you currently working on?
Chalhoub Group, the leading retailer of a high-end luxury brand in the Middle East is one of FarEye’s clients. They wanted to transform their last mile delivery execution and provide customers an omni-channel experience. To help Chalhoub Group achieve these goals, FarEye introduced the industry’s lrst workmow-automation engine to create highly customisable workmows.
Leveraging FarEye’s user-friendly app, Chalhoub’s delivery executives were able to eflciently manage their day, easily navigate routes, track their tasks on mobile devices and take digital proof of deliveries. Logistics managers, on the other hand, got real-time visibility into ground activities ensuring better control and predictability. FarEye empowered Chalhoub Group to provide high levels of customer engagement and increase their customer satisfaction scores.
What are some of the factors holding back greater adoption of automation?
The logistics and supply chain industry in the Middle East has historically been quite labour intensive, heavily dependent on manual tasks and a slow adopter of technology. However, the sector is looking forward to some interesting times ahead.
The region’s logistics market is expected to reach a value of $66.3 Billion by 2020. The e-commerce sector is already booming with the Amazon effect starting to change the consumer habits. Therefore, a rapid move towards automation is absolutely necessary.
What is lacking right now is the awareness and presence of eflcient digital logistics platforms that allow businesses to automate processes without much changes in the existing system, go-to-market faster, build business driven logistics processes on the my and also enable them to provide value added services to endcustomers. With partnerships with the right automation platforms, the logistics industry can move much faster towards automation.