Sharing Economy and Logistics

Sharing economy is the new fad and has definitely caught attention of industries around the world. However, it’s not a vanguard concept. Carpooling, for example, has long been a mode of sharing both the cost and asset involved in the commute. However, the same concept assisted by technology is turning a good community practice into a profitable business model.

The success of Uber, Airbnb and TaskRabbit isn’t a fad — it’s a new way of doing business,” PwC said.

It’s not the idea of sharing that’s new. What’s changed is the infusion of technology into the concept of sharing the excess capacity; and, that’s exactly why we are seeing a new crops of startups in logistics that are using technology to find more efficient way to move goods from A to B.

Sharing Economy and Intra-City Logistics — A Case Study

As a technology logistics firm, Quifers has been serving multitude of clients belonging to different industry domains. We started with a business model of aggregating commercial vehicle and connecting them on real time to people who wanted to move goods around city, be it a small or large enterprise.

However, we noticed a huge underutilized capacity that could be shared between our users, and realized how the concept of sharing economy (load sharing) can be a unique opportunity in the logistics domain, especially intra city logistics.

Through sophisticated algorithms deployed over GPS and mobile technology, we introduced the concept of load sharing which makes goods transportation a lot easier and affordable.

Our webapp and customer app easily lets our user tender orders in form of pickups and deliveries that they need to make. Our back-end algorithm searches for the available capacity in trucks running throughout the city and routes the vehicle to process the received orders. This way, our customers need not pay for the full truck but only for the capacity of truck they are using. Our algorithm (which is accessible to our clients through a web-app) schedules the orders optimizing not only the distance or time but also the capacity of the vehicle, providing real time visibility across the operations.

In fact, the value offerings have instigated many a business to outsource their first and last mile leg of supply chain to us. That’s not just because of the economies that we are able to develop in the current system but also because of the comprehensive solution that we have build for managing the logistics.

We do know that logistics (in India especially) is a difficult monster to tame, but keeping the technology at our heart; the genie is not going back in the bottle.