Delivery OS:
In 2019, there was a tweet about businesses someone could start with 2 million naira and someone responded:
Start a delivery company
So, the person basically broke down how you could get a second-hand bike for 350 thousand naira and purchase bikes that would be leased to riders who would use it for only delivery and pay a monthly fee.
I can't say if that was great advice, my problem was with the respondent of the tweet saying the original tweep should get 4 bikes. Why not start with 1?
Apparently, people think logistics or delivery is a walk in the park but then there is a reason why people pursue post-graduate degrees in supply-chain & logistics.
So two things are important to consider when thinking about a delivery business, a large part of it constitutes logistics which requires proactive management at the tiniest scale & secondly, we live in Nigeria where some infrastructural dependencies like good roads and high-quality workers (drivers) are quite scarce.
So let’s look at some of the problems someone starting a delivery company would face:
Problem 1: Logistics
If you don’t learn anything today please learn that logistics is not just another word for transport or delivery. It is about managing the entire transport and delivery process from end to end.
To break it down further,
Investopedia defines Logistics as the overall process of managing how resources are acquired, stored, and transported to their final destination.
The problem with Logistics is its core; management.
It's not easy to manage anything, talk less about logistics because things tend to go wrong when you are in the business of moving things from one place to another. In a perfect country, there could be order mixups, technicalities that cause delays in deliveries, dubious staff, and unresponsive customers.
In a country like Nigeria, 3x all the issues that were just mentioned.
The crazy thing is that these issues start even when you are operating with one delivery vehicle with less than 10 customers and you might have a handle on them but by the time it gets to you having 20 delivery vehicles, 40 staff working shifts and hundreds of customers, how do you manage the logistics?
The most successful delivery and e-commerce companies like Amazon have put in place war-ready logistics management systems that start with people and evolve to digital logistics management. Kobo360 is another good example and you can tell a lot about their operations with the suite of apps and offerings they have made available considering they started as an Uber for trucks.
Problem 2: Nigeria and To Some Extent Africa
It is reported that 20,000 vehicles are involved in road accidents every year in Nigeria. Lagos might have a quarter of that if you consider the poor roads and care-free drivers
The gist here is that logistics is hard to manage here because the roads don’t help.
The second problem is the quality of staff that you can get and ensure you can put in place the systems to get them to work efficiently. Such systems include putting in place a hiring process for driver and support staff and putting in place incentives & consequences where required.
The crazy thing about all the issues that Nigeria faces is that they are also common in other African countries, their roads may not be as bad as Nigeria’s but the staff management aspect of it all can be gruesome.
Managing logistics in Nigeria is quite the herculean task and if you do not have systems in place to take care of it, you will have a hard time managing the business.
It is not easy to implement both physical and digital systems for logistics management, you’d have to use crude human processes first and then make enough money to build or buy a digital system that would help you manage your entire operations.
But what if you could easily build and implement digital logistics management systems that you could keep track of by yourself?
What if you started on the first day?
DeliveryOS Got You
To fix the logistics management problems we just mentioned and so much more, DeliveryOS just launched and it is a cloud platform that powers businesses with different tools for logistics in and out of Africa so that they can serve their customers better and go borderless.
So anyone who starts a delivery company does not have to start building from scratch, they can easily leverage DeliveryOS for an end to end management of their logistics process.
So if you start with one delivery vehicle and intend to scale, you can leverage DeliveryOS to manage all the data and operations in the business.
Some Interesting Features:
Driver Management: Instead of tracking and managing your drivers on a piece of paper or excel sheet, you can actually leverage Delivery OS, get all of them registered and assign routes and vehicles to each of them. DeliveryOS even tops it up a notch and offers driver tracking for people to see the progress of every delivery in real-time.
Order Management: Every delivery process starts with an order and ends when the orders are in the hands of the customers.
With Delivery OS, you can manage your orders and keep up with order fulfilment. At the end of the month, you can tell how many orders you got, how many were completed and other details that would help you track progress.Customer Management: Every order comes with a customer and DeliveryOS would help you keep track of customers who create orders as well as those who might have recurring orders. You can get analytics on the number of orders you have got and the number of orders per customer. This gives you some idea of who your most customers are.
Vehicle Management: Your delivery process is only as good as the vehicles you have in place to cater. DeliveryOS has a system in which you can add and manage vehicles, it doesn’t matter if it’s a fleet, you can keep stock of your vehicles.
Infrastructure To Build Your Own: In case you have an existing system and you need to integrate some of Delivery OS’s features, you can do that by leveraging their APIs.
Use Cases:
Delivery Os already works for delivery and logistics businesses and we know that already but some businesses have delivery embedded within and these are the ones that excite me the most.
Medical Testing Labs Can Leverage DeliveryOS: The process of getting and transporting specimens and results for tests still involves logistics and with DeliveryOS, medical testing labs can manage that process giving them the leeway to venture into the healthtech space where delivery is a problem.
Ambulance & Emergency Services: A lot of accidents happen daily in Nigeria and more tech-enabled health firms are actively trying to help people get medical care faster. With DeliveryOS they would only need to worry about delivering their services.
Store Fronts: A lot of companies are setting up verticals with storefronts and more of them may want to set up delivery extensions, with DeliveryOS would make these extensions happen seamlessly helping them manage their orders and even vehicles.
Vendors In Diverse Industries: I thought about large scale event vendors when this came to mind and it was mostly regarding how they need to make deliveries from time to time.
If I Worked At DeliveryOS:
It’s hard to add anything to DeliveryOS, other than suggesting initiatives that would power growth for the product. Getting it into the hands of more companies across Africa who use it to manage delivery would have an impact on the efficiency of the product.
Some things that would be great to see after DeliveryOS blows up are:
Delivery Company Discovery Portal: It would be great to have a marketplace of delivery companies that people can select from and even rate to suggest to others how good they are. This would open up an income source for DeliveryOS and it would cement its place as the backbone of the industry
There may be some limitations to this, especially when some clients don’t get the ratings they want and then start agitating over that but then with the right model to satisfy all parties, I am sure there will be a way for DeliveryOS to make a play for this.Tracking 3rd Parties: Some companies work as third parties to other companies, it would be great if these other parties could track the delivery with DeliveryOS. For Example, an event planner hires a delivery company leveraging DeliveryOS and they need to track the dispatcher at all times, there could be a third party application that would help the said event planner get the required information.
Conclusion:
Amazon has become unstoppable because of how much its customers can trust them to deliver promptly, there are several businesses who have won the hearts of the public just because of their mission to offer prompt delivery in Nigeria, A good example is ChowDeck whose rival; Jumia Foods has struggled to keep up. In China, the leading food delivery