Retail Asia 2018 RA September.October 2018 (Online) | Page 53

LOGISTICS
Starting the retail
transformation journey
with digitising logistics
Start-ups in Asia are increasingly revolutionising last-mile logistics today. Marco De
Lorenzo, co-founder and chief commercial officer at Singapore software company Zyllem,
tells Muneerah Bee why it is important for retailers to digitise the logistics process to
optimise the time needed to deliver goods to the store and customers.
T
he retail industry is currently
under enormous pressure.
Not only are the margins low,
but e-commerce players such
as Lazada, Alibaba and Amazon are
also pushing in the market and taking
market shares from the established
retail players and they offer similar
products with more shipping options
and faster service.
However, retailers have one
tremendous advantage that they should
not neglect, De Lorenzo reminded.
“They have always been closest to
the end-consumer and hence know
the market best. But retailers need to
leverage this. Transform these valuable
insights into actionable processes.”
One of the key elements is logistics
and it constitutes two main parts: the
sourcing side and the distribution
side. According to De Lorenzo, the
right sourcing defines the right quality,
price and delivery time from the
retailers’ established suppliers. With
the retail industry’s long traditional
relationships to be able to bring the
right merchandise at the right time for
the right quality into the right markets,
they know these processes best and
know the right merchandise to offer.
“To compete with the e-commerce
power players, retailers will need a
way to lower their distribution costs,
whether it is through their own assets
or through partnership,” he added.
The first step is to digitise the
logistic processes to understand the
distribution cost and performance on
the current services. Secondly, measure,
monitor and reduce the costs, and
lastly, implement visibility on customer
“To compete with the e-commerce
power players, retailers will need
a way to lower their distribution
costs, whether it is through
their own assets or through
partnership.”
– Marco De Lorenzo,
Co-Founder and CCO, Zyllem
satisfaction rating. “Through this
transformation, they will gain insights
to help them scale their business such
as the decision to outsource, maintain
their own fleet or a mix of partnership
offering new services at an affordable
price, and the ability to meet those
service-level agreement (SLA) and the
demand of the customer,” De Lorenzo
explained.
Visibility matters
As e-commerce businesses strive to offer
customers various options such as B2C
delivery, cash on demand and click-
and-collect, it is rather inefficient and
cumbersome to manage it all with pen
and paper, he pointed out. “You want
to have a full integrated software which
integrates into your e-commerce/order
management system (OMS)/enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system, which
helps you to optimise fixed (B2B) and
dynamic (B2C) routing and gives you
full visibility at any time in the process.
Without a system, the company will
not be able to assist their customers on
the most basic query such as ‘When
will I receive my order?’”
For businesses that still run on
paper and pen, they will need to
call the warehouse, track down the
operator or the driver to obtain the
most basic information such as a
delivery progress or status.
Aside from customer enquiries,
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