We enable world-class supply chain management in the "first- and last-mile" using only the resources already at hand. In rapidly industrializing regions of Asia and Africa, over 70% of citizens live in rural towns and villages where coordination of off-grid commerce is problematic. Here, logistical performance is low, and operating costs are higher than necessary.

Recognizing the deep penetration of mobile phones amongst households, we’ve turned already prolific low-end handsets into potent business tools. Our novel cloud- hosted service collects inventory, order and sales data; and in return, offers optimized inventory/replenishment decision support and transportation auction services for anyone with a mobile phone – thereby extending visibility, improving delivery performance, reducing waste and increasing competitiveness for retailers, distributors, transporters, wholesalers and producers. Addressing these problems with transactional systems and analytics represents an opportunity to integrate over a hundred million small businesses and BoP producers into national and global supply networks.

Logistimo is scalable and affordable supply chain technology tailored for governments, corporations, small businesses and Base-of-Pyramid entrepreneurs. It is sold as hosted web service platform that is uniquely simple, flexible, affordable, scalable and rapidly deployed. We believe adoption of the technology -- especially real-time opportunistic decision support for users -- carries significant positive externalities in rural areas of emerging markets, tangibly impacting the condition of the world’s poorest citizens & fostering self-reliance. Focus sectors include:



► Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
► Agriculture & Dairy
► Livelihoods (Arts, Crafts & Textiles)
► Durables & Retail Consumer Goods
► Construction & Heavy Industrial Goods
► Environmental Stewardship & Sustainable Energy
► Disaster Response & Reconstruction
► Education

► Water

Problem

First- and last-mile logistics systems require quality demand and inventory data shared through reliable coordination mechanisms to prevent unnecessary cost and waste. But the ideal condition — real time actionable data — is difficult to come by. Ground realities contribute to this. Poor road infrastructure means long delivery lead times, the absence of computerized systems result in major information asymmetry and delays, and people generally operate without deep visibility into what else is happening along the supply channel. These obstacles magnify uncertainty, contributing to demand misinterpretation, insufficient availability of essential goods, higher inventory costs, expiry and waste — all in boom-and-bust cycles, or what operations researchers call the “bullwhip effect”. Further, collection & distribution chains serving small towns, villages and hamlets of the developing world are highly fragmented and informal, preventing small enterprises from scaling larger at sub-linear cost. Without clear real-time awareness at the periphery of the network, even large organizations – such as wholesalers, distributors and transporters – cannot capitalize on market opportunities. The bottom line: informal or low-resource supply chains are imbalanced, wasteful and insufficient – carrying negative socioeconomic externalities.

Solution

Logistimo uniquely offers industry-caliber transactional enterprise systems to the cloud and makes these available to low-end mobile handsets. Moreover, the technology is tailored for the rural context – designed for simplicity for the semi-literate, flexibility to suit a fast-evolving environment, scalability for the massive market space, affordability for the prevalent cash-constrained customer, and resiliency under unpredictable network contexts. We offer fully hosted, supported, and customizable supply chain management services accessible through common mobile phones or desktop web browsers. The cloud-side logistics intelligence is well suited to manage inventories for any warehouse, clinical stockroom, farm, corner shop, refugee camp, orchard, classroom, truck or backpack. Core services include: 1. Data collection and management: Acquire high-quality transaction data via mobile handsets from various nodes in a supply network. 2. Inventory track and trace: Visibility of stock levels and flows of commodities across the supply chain. 3. Order Management: Replenishment orders can be captured and made visible to a broad range of upstream vendors. Order fulfillment is also be tracked via handset. 4. Demand forecasting: Algorithms estimate future demand for items, even under seasonal variability. 5. Inventory optimization: System-optimized replenishment quantities and schedules maintain reliable stock levels to minimize both stock-outs leading to lost sales, and over-stock situations leading to expiry. 6. Dispatching: Using source, destination & commodity data, push SMS is utilized to work as a reverse-auction dispatching service wherein folks who were idle can suddenly earn income delivering goods. We call this “crowd-sourced transportation”. 7. Sales Agent tools: The ability to register customers and place orders is useful for direct marketing approaches, such as what sales agents do. Using GPS devices (if available), one may also track movements. 8. Analytics: With sufficient customer volume, we can analyze supply and demand patterns across multiple dimensions of product category, demography and geography. These analytics are useful for facility location decisions, monitoring, distribution and marketing – and can be sold to manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers and government agencies.

Example

Logistimo is business software tailor-made for rural operations, and ultimately for bottom-of-the-pyramid entrepreneurs. The platform supports several configurations, categorized roughly as [1] Mobile Enterprise Tools – extending the reach of ERP for MNCs, or as a stand-alone SCM appliance for SMEs. [2] Mobile Marketplace – connecting village producers and consumers to with broader audiences. [3] Crowd Sourced Transportation – auctioning ad hoc courier opportunities for villagers to self-organize around the foremost logistics obstacle in emerging markets today: the cost and availability of delivery. Market validation has occurred in South India and East Africa – where we’ve evolved user experience for the semi-literate, benchmarked value created for customers, and tested pricing models. But requirements and business models are fairly consistent from Brazil to Kenya, and from Afghanistan to Vietnam. There are tens-of-millions of micro-entrepreneur customers in this global marketplace, and tens-of-millions more SMEs, corporate outposts and public-sector facilities. Adoption will empower unemployed individuals to participate in commerce, and for SMEs to compete, expand and hire locally.

Marketplace

Enterprise technology is a "fast clockspeed" industry, especially in the cloud+mobile age. It is therefore difficult to predict how competitive forces will shape the landscape. The success of early movers will naturally encourage competition and the subsequent emergence of a wide array of service offerings from many companies over a range of devices/platforms. On one end of the spectrum you’ll find niché offerings targeting a specific vertical — likely bundled with other related services. On the other hand, you’ll see highly focused logistics/SCM services applicable across many sectors, but appealing to a specific business sensibility (e.g. lowest cost, or best quality). The market will (hopefully) grow to millions of users across many sectors. In terms of impacts, we first envision new market connectivity paradigms re-shaping rural commerce, followed by productivity gains as a result of widespread use. Not only should a wider-range of essential products become more reliably accessible, but also the typical “middle men” will be forced to add more value than simply being the “relationship on which commerce relies upon”. NGOs, cooperatives and corporations will have to deliver more value, in more ways, to the villagers’ benefit. Call us optimistic, but technology diffusion and management behavior appear to drive a winning scenario. Logistimo should therefore compete on quality — because that resonates with our core supply chain and technology competencies. This implies deeper examination into “impact metrics” to differentiate from competitors, especially potential new entrants coming from the traditional business software space (like SAP or Oracle). Furthermore, you can expect Logistimo to be increasingly directed towards private enterprise customers, deepening our involvement in nutritional security and healthcare, and making great efforts to collaborate with organizations empowering women and girls to address the gender gap. We feel these domains are of paramount importance. Today Logistimo is unique with no fully-overlapping competitors. However, indirect competitors from the public sector include Esoko and Voxiva (mostly in Africa). These do not have scalable models or significant market adoption. Stronger private sector rivalries are certain to emerge, though currently these only compete with a subset of our offering: Nokia Tej (India) provides order management for sales agents, but their aim is really to sell handsets, and they may be winding down now; CellBazaar (Bangladesh) is an online classifieds, and Frogtek (Mexico) is a point-of-sale solution whose model is currently to sell Android hardware and external scanners. Most of the above focus on smart-phone platforms, and none have mastered the technology needed to scale on ubiquitous low-end devices. None have gained significant bottom-up market adoption.