How AI support in the background for delivery platforms helps manage the festive season
By Rahul Mehra, Co-Founder of Roadcast
October 22, 2022  The festive season in India, especially during Diwali boosts sales to unprecedented growth. This surge in orders also increases pressure on the logistics companies to ensure timely deliveries. To a large extent, AI has facilitated this move by helping retailers target and engage online shoppers and manage stock and logistics down to the last step. This includes the accumulation of knowledge of consumer behaviour and the application of new-age solutions like multi-point pickups and end-to-end visibility with the help of AI-powered tools.
User-friendly AI interfaces aid in enhanced route planning to plan daily delivery operations taking into consideration various variables like traffic, rider availability, time etc. This is especially important for high-volume seasons and AI is the only current way to manage high volumes efficiently. Manually this task will be error-prone and at a much slower pace thus, affecting deliveries and orders eventually. From tracking live status to direct connectivity with the delivery executive, AI has revolutionalised the way the logistics industry is functioning and handling this busy season. Here’s how AI is crucial to seamless logistics during the festive season :
Connectivity - Enabling seamless and swift communication between suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and consumers, AI-powered tools help in digitizing the supply chain thus, reducing the margin of error. This helps in building technology-powered, cohesive partnerships across the entire supply chain.
Agility and accuracy - Chiselling out the leeway for analogue errors, AI-powered solutions allow for effective risk assessment and prompt decision-making, all while computing umpteen variables to provide effective solutions. This helps in taking preventive measures and ensuring that the customers do not face any delays in delivery.
Personalized consumer-retailer relationship - AI-backed advanced analytics helps delivery platforms in connecting with their consumers including their feedback for services and products. Enabling a direct channel for consumers to put forth their expectations and feedback is a great asset for vendors as well which eventually helps the logistics arm. This in turn allows for steady growth, superlative quality control and increased customer trust in their business.
Inventory management - One of the major verticals for any business is inventory management, especially in preparation for the festive season. Currently, with the growth of e-commerce and Q-commerce, this data not only requires purchase insights for different cities but is now further bifurcated into hyper-local geographies, demographics, and individual consumer purchase patterns. All this is possible because of AI. The availability of real-time insights about cancellations, order volume, product feedback, timeline etc helps the delivery partners identify the demand and supply graph ahead of time and furnish inventory. The tech tools smoothen the last-mile delivery operations and prevent pilferage. AI-powered digital supply chain enumerates demand and supply backed by data obtained from your supply chain insights to help companies forecast production, warehousing and last-mile delivery.
Supply Chain Management - Rapid deliveries, same-day deliveries and even next-day deliveries have become the new norm when it comes to e-commerce shopping. All this is possible because of the availability of micro warehouses, sorting facilities etc. These facilities have been made possible by AI-powered tech that aids in strategic planning to set up dark stores, enable rider tie-ups based on pin codes and demand and supply, incentives, payouts etc not only preventing human error but also making these tasks less tedious. AI helps in keeping the supply chain robust and agile.
AI not only makes it easier to deploy fleet management and logistics solutions at scale but also helps in streamlining delivery, and inventory management including warehousing. From analysing customer behaviour and predicting patterns to powering automated order completion, the benefits of AI are abundant and excessively important for a crucial time like the festive season.
Founded in 2015 by Vishal Jain, Anshul Jain, and Rahul Mehra, Roadcast  is a Delhi-based SaaS company that operates as a technology provider for logistics enterprises.