This is a guest post by Krupa Sonecha, VP of Product at Holachef, a leading food delivery service in Mumbai and Pune. Holachef delivers food prepared from its own kitchens.
“With great order numbers comes great responsibility!”
– Saurabh Saxena, Co-founder & CEO, Holachef
That was the only ‘problem statement’ that came to our tech team from Saurabh who by the way is always pulling our (social media team included) ears about making everything better for each and every Holachef user.
In 2015 when our orders stood at over 1000 meals every day with a just a handful of locations in Mumbai (at present we are available in 100+ PIN codes across the city) we had by then started building our own kitchen. The idea was to empower our chefs to really scale with the space equipment and ease of operations that we were creating for them. It was at this point that we had to focus on dual goals of ‘increasing orders’ and ‘ensuring smooth and timely deliveries’.
While some of us were tracking daily sales and growth numbers Saurabh was tracking if each and every order was getting delivered on time or not.
For customers this might seem like the problem of ‘order time pe nahi aaya’ (the order did not reach on time) but for us tracking an order is a lot more than just that. We wanted to track:
- Whether deliveries reach customers on-time relative to the delivery slot promised
- The percentage of time in a shift that delivery executives are idle
- How far are delivery executives from the hub after delivering their last order
- Where exactly is the order when a customer complains (80% of our support calls are about where they’ve reached) and what is the accurate ETA(expected time of arrival)
- The exact path taken by the delivery executive for an escalated complaint escalated and the ability to replay the trip to see the progress in time and space
Stops in context of an action
Not just this, to optimize the resources (manpower vehicles and time) each delivery executive leaves with multiple deliveries in a trip. We also wanted to:
- Find available delivery executives nearest to the dispatch hubs so we could assign them the orders and then track them with an ETA until they arrived for the pickup
- Get upfront ETAs for all deliveries in a trip and then track the trip progress
- Re-order cancel and re-assign deliveries on the fly based on changing circumstances
- Get alerted when drivers were running late due to traffic unscheduled stops moving away from the destination or going off-radar due to network or battery issues
Bird’s eye view of live trips with status alerts
Therefore between every ‘mera order kahaan hai?’ (where’s my order?) and ‘ladka nikal gaya hai’ (it is on its way) ?conversation there’s a lot that gets tracked in real-time for each and every confirmed order at Holachef
– Anil Gelra Co-founder & CTO Holachef
As the number of orders increased at Holachef so did our search for a system or technology that would help enhance our customer’s experience.
It was at this point that HyperTrack came in and worked closely with us to integrate the desired features and dashboard that would enable us to manage the order deliveries seamlessly.
Our team wanted to provide a consistent end customer experience and was concerned about enabling order tracking on a map if it was only going to be available for a small subset of deliveries. HyperTrack was already being used heavily by one of our logistics partners and we knew it was working well for them. It helped that the APIs allowed for delivery partners to seamlessly integrate tracking of our portion of deliveries into our internal dashboard and our notification to customers. We are able to optimize the performance of our delivery staff and soon will be able to compare the performance of our in-house deliveries with those of our delivery partner.
Real-time order tracking is a big boon to food-delivery services like us where time is extremely critical. With Mumbai’s complex geography and over 100 PIN codes to serve in this city alone there’s a lot that we are able to do because of HyperTrack.
Krupa Sonecha is VP Product Holachef. She manages and heads the consumer facing product of the brand. She has been a part of their team since the last one year. In the past she has worked with many reputed names such as Sony Entertainment Television Leo Burnett etc. Also see Holachef blog.
