Swiggy company Supr Daily is a micro delivery service for milk, eggs, bread, fruits, veggies, and other groceries at customer's doorstep by 7am. They use HyperTrack to track delivery drivers and payout based on distance driven. This is an Interview with Director of Products (Supply Chain), Praveen Kumar
Leigh: Can you please tell me your name, your title, and the name of your company?
Praveen: My name is Praveen and I'm the Director of Products for Supply Chain at Supr Daily, Swiggy, India.
Leigh: So if you had to describe what your company does in one short sentence, what would you say?
Praveen: Yeah, so we are into micro deliveries of groceries and milk, customers place orders until 11 pm in the night, and we deliver by 7 am in the morning.
Leigh: Can you tell me a little bit about the kinds of problems and issues that you were facing before you started working with HyperTrack?
Praveen: Right. We have about 4-digit delivery executives who deliver on the clock. I mean, between 4 am and 7 am. I think it's very important for us to track what's happening on the ground, because of a lot of variables that affect our business, and it's very important for us to deliver on time.
We were looking for solutions that will help us, you know, track the delivery executives, one is from a monitoring perspective. Second is how do we make sure the delivery executives go to the customers' location so that we're very sure that there is a delivery that has been guaranteed to the customer. The third thing that we wanted was to find a solution that will help us pay the delivery executive for the kilometers that they have traveled.
These were the three primary things that we wanted to solve, or we want to solve as a business at this point in time. That's when we were looking for solutions that have been there and already solved this. I think that's when we came into touch with HyperTrack team.
Leigh: Fantastic. How did these issues negatively impact your company's performance or your KPIs?
Praveen: So one thing, there was no trust in the systems when it came to fuel payout. Usually, the fuel payouts reconciliations used to happen manually from the operations managers of the delivery executives. And there was always a tussle between what is right and what is wrong. Delivery executives used to say that they have traveled about 10 kilometers and the managers used to reconcile it on a day-to-day basis in Google Sheets. When we shifted to HyperTrack, there was a neat dashboard that was shown in real-time for both the managers as well as the delivery executives or delivery partners. Because they could see the distance they traveled on the maps visually.
Leigh: Right, got you. What was the breaking point? What was the moment where you said enough's enough, we need to find a solution?
Praveen: It was an issue that was always coming from the ground for a long time. And we in fact tried building solutions in-house to be able to address some of these issues. What we realized was that it's a deeper problem than we thought it was. It needs to be specific to mobile devices, specific to people and there are a lot of standards that need to be followed. The task was a little bit of an engineering feat by itself. That's when we realized that we don't have enough team members to go deep into solving this kind of problem. And if there are people out there with ready-made solutions, we should definitely explore. That was the context in which we discovered HyperTrack. Yeah, that's how we have integrated HyperTrack into our systems.
Leigh: Right, I understand. Thank you for that. So how were these issues affecting your company's performance before you started using HyperTrack?
Praveen: Right. Since we're doing five-digit deliveries every day, it became a little challenge for us to kind of understand where is my delivery executive on the ground. And to be able to do it at scale is a lot more tedious challenge for the people who are managing delivery partners. A lot of times what used to happen is, [wondering] why is the delivery delayed? And then we call up the managers and they will be like, I don't know where the delivery executive is and I'm not able to reach out to him. But the breaking point truly is, where is the delivery executive? Why are they stuck in a specific place? I think these two are the things that were made to us available in real-time [by HyperTrack], and we were able to action on it.
Leigh: Can you tell us about finding HyperTrack? What was that like?
Praveen: Sure. As always, we usually refer to the people in our network, to see what are the solutions, which are being used in the industry. And of course, we also relied on Google to see what are the different options that we have. But there were a bunch of issues that came up. And I think we kind of spoke to some of our industry experts and industry colleagues from different companies. There are some names that popped up, and we shortlisted about three to five names. And then we took about two to three and did an extensive study on the documentation. In fact, we also spoke to some of the existing customers from these companies. That's how HyperTrack was one of the companies in the consideration set for us to use for location-related problems. We did speak to all 2-3 of them. One of the things that really stood out in HyperTrack is the support and clarification that came from them. It's not even like you need to send an email and wait for 24 hours. There's a WhatsApp group and if you put something on the group, there's always a response. Right from the time of demos to integrations to bugs. We were behind them and there was a lot of mutual collaboration and respect that came out. Eventually, it helped out for both HyperTrack and Supr Daily, where both our products got better over a period of time. And it really helped to unlock the potential of both sides. That's how it happened.
Leigh: Great. What do you feel sets HyperTrack apart?
Praveen: For companies that are based on SaaS or [selling to] businesses, one of the things that I've always found as a pain point is, is my interaction experience right from demos to integration and the support after we go live. I would definitely rate HyperTrack 11 on 10 for all these things. I don't remember a time where they took like two days to respond or something. In fact, they were behind us to make things happen. I think that's the differentiating factor for any B2B SaaS company. That's one thing that stands out for me, in my experience of working with HyperTrack.
While I do say that, interaction and support are one of the key highlights, I don't want to undermine the technological feat that has happened in making this product possible on the ground, because it's a very hard problem. There's a lot of different devices on the ground, different budgets, etc. I think making it work at scale with different devices, different geographies, different people is a really, really tough problem. I think they have nicely laid it as an SDK and just gave it as plug-and-play for a business like us who value this problem, but don't have the time to kind of go deep and solve this problem.
Leigh: Great. In your own words, similar to how you described your company in one sentence, how would you describe HyperTrack in one short sentence?
Praveen: Okay, Let me try from what I can do. I think it's - "Just integrate, plug-and-play and forget about everything else". I think they have all the ingredients to track, payout, geofence, etc. I think to trust the locations that you want to deliver, you have to integrate HyperTrack.
Leigh: Great. Can you talk to us a bit about how you and your team are using HyperTrack on a day-to-day basis?
Praveen: There are 3 use cases that we are using HyperTrack for at this point in time, although there are a lot of features,
- One primarily to monitor the real-time activities of our delivery partners. That dashboard is now being used by most of the people on the ground to monitor the fleet.
- Second is we have moved to HyperTrack based distance payouts. We are using the data that HyperTrack is giving us to do the payout calculation for the distance DEs travel every day.
- The third is we're also exploring using the trips and geofencing that HyperTrack provides right now to enforce the deliveries in a specific location. That's the third use case that we're doing at this point in time.
Leigh: Great, what do you like best about HyperTrack?
Praveen: I think from an engineering standpoint—the top team of HyperTrack.
The data is almost available all the time. Now that you have asked specifically about it, one of the things that I really loved was when there is an outage, it really tells you what is the reason for the outage very clearly in your dashboard. Second thing is, every nuanced moment is accompanied by a distance, and what happened at that moment.
These are the two things because of which I was blown away when I saw the dashboard, which is very nice to see. Why exactly something happened, and what is the reason why the outage happened, these two things help us in actually fixing the core of the issues, as opposed to saying, hey, the product is not working fine. Nuanced data gathering and data presentation is probably what I love about HyperTrack.
Leigh: Is there anything that doesn't quite work for you or you'd like to see improved?
Praveen: Yeah, I think one of the things which have been a challenge for us, in fact, we have worked a fair bit of it during our integration, is that India is a country where we have different varieties of mobile phones and different prices range of mobile phones. The battery-saving techniques of these phones are very different from each other. That poses a challenge to make the app being active for the longest time. For example, if you don't use the app, then I think it gets killed automatically and there is little control that we can do until the person actually goes and gives us the permissions manually and I don't think we can control the permission through code. How would have this work in varied devices across different ranges in a country like India, that's something that we should definitely point fingers at and make sure that works.
Leigh: So how do you and your team feel after you started using HyperTrack? How did it feel overall for your team?
Praveen: We have forgotten about what happens to delivery executives on the ground and are they tracked, and do we know how much traveling. We have just integrated and let the teams use it. We are literally not thinking about how to solve that problem anymore. That particular problem has gone away from our heads.
Now we are trying to explore the next part of the systems as I talked about the trips and geofencing and that's where we want to invest. But if I were to summarize, we have stopped thinking about trying to know where our delivery partners are on the ground. One of the mind spaces is actually gotten freed up at this point in time. That's how I feel. I feel lighter by one problem being reduced.
Leigh: Perfect. Do you have any KPIs or metrics of success that you'd be able to share with us? Do you have any numbers available that you could talk about?
Praveen: Our tracking coverage for all our delivery executives is close to about 90-92% for which we didn't have a benchmark reference before maybe we can say sub 10%.
Second is, our distance payout has brought in transparency, and about 98% of our delivery partners are happy with the data that we show to them.
The third one I think from a cost perspective, we were able to reduce 10-20% over the amount that we used to pay earlier. I think that's what has happened. These are the three major things that have happened for us after using HyperTrack
Leigh: What problems are you solving by using HyperTrack and what benefits have you realized?
Praveen: Yeah, so the key problem we are solving at this point in time is enabling our ground teams and central operations team to have visibility on where the delivery partners are and to track them. And second is to do a fair payout for the kilometers they traveled. And third is to make sure that the delivery partners are going to the location and we want to enforce geofencing on them. I think these are the three problem areas we trying to solve at this point in time at Supr Daily.
So for the current use case, I think paying out DEs fairly is very important. And that's very important for us to give a good customer experience, having a complete breakdown on where things were tracked and not tracked. And putting this information out to our delivery partners has helped our delivery partners have trust in the way show this data to them. And yeah, this is the first use case. I think we have benefited at this point in time from our integration with HyperTrack.
Leigh: Do you feel that the original problem that you are facing is solved or is on the way to being solved?
Praveen: I think they're definitely solved. For sure. I can tell that because we have been running it for quite a few months now. And the feedback has been great, and there have been no call-outs, the dashboards are loading fine, and the data is correct. And we have in fact done payouts based on the data, and people are happy on the ground. And since all the outputs are going in the right direction, I would say that the problem has been solved.
Leigh: Perfect and so the last question here is would you recommend HyperTrack and if so why?
Praveen: One of the key differentiating factors, as I spoke earlier, is the way that they do the integration and the way they respond to all the issues that might come up. That speeds up the development by a huge mile. That's one of the typical reasons why I'm very skeptical when I integrate a third-party solution, but that's something that you can for sure know that it's on the other end of the spectrum. HyperTrack has a really good support system, where people from across the company get involved to make sure that the problems are resolved on priority. They put the right people and the best minds between solving the problem I think that's one of the reasons why I would recommend that anyone should go ahead with HyperTrack for integration
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