Swiggy company Supr Daily is a daily 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 Sr Engineering Manager, Siddardha Garimella
Leigh: Can you please tell me your name, your title, and the name of your company?
Siddardha: Hi, I am Siddardha, I am Senior Engineering Manager at Supr Daily
Leigh: If you had to describe what your company does in one short sentence, what would you say?
Siddardha: We are a daily needs service company, where we take orders from customers till 11 in the night and deliver the goods between 4 to 7 in the morning. So by the time they wake up in the morning, it's like Christmas, where they get all the goods out there.
Leigh: Perfect. Can you tell me a little bit about the kinds of problems and issues that you were facing before you started working with HyperTrack?
Siddardha: At Supr Daily, it's really important that we deliver a seamless experience to the customers, where we need to ensure that whatever they have ordered we are able to deliver in a very reliable manner every single day. So for us, the most important thing is to be able to have visibility of what our delivery executives are doing on the ground, where they're traveling, are they taking the right path, and are they reaching every single customer every single time without any issues. So that is one of the most important things. And to be able to do that we need very detailed visibility and monitoring of the delivery executive's activities so that we can keep track and call out in case of issues and so on.
The other problem is that we also need to ensure that we are doing this in as efficient ways as possible. So the major challenges we used to typically face were that, first and foremost the application we are using right now does not give us detailed visibility into the location and the path the delivery executives take. This is translating into problems like, sometimes they deliver and we don't know whether they have delivered at the right location, and customer face issues, so on and so forth. So this complete lack of visibility causes a lot of issues where we are not able to support the customers in the right manner. And hence overall causing issues to our customers.
Second thing is, we also need to depend heavily on the delivery executive's inputs in terms of how much distance he has traveled on the ground, to be used as one of the factors or inputs for making the payouts. And again, this was completely dependent on the delivery executive. He basically takes a photo of his kilometer reading, what was it at the beginning of the trip and what was it at the end of the trip. And the biggest problem was that it's in the hands of the delivery executive and we did not have really good control on top of it, leading to a lot of leakages in terms of the payouts.
So these were two major challenges, which we were facing at Supr Daily, which we definitely wanted to tackle, as we were scaling up to many, many more customers going forward.
Leigh: Fantastic. How did these issues negatively impact your company's performance or your KPIs?
Siddardha: Right. So these directly impacted two very important KPIs for the company. One of them was our reliability and customer experience where the metric we used to track was the number of deliveries we do without any issues, and the visibility of how the delivery executive was performing, where was he delivering, was directly translating to our fulfillment numbers, as we call them. So that is one of the primary metrics. Second is what we typically call the cost per delivery, which is the cost we incur from the business point of view, to be able to do that seamless delivery. These were two things that were not in our control. And we were depending on inputs from the delivery executive, which was not clean at all, it was a handicap for us. And we wanted a more technology-driven or product-driven solution to help us make the system better and scalable as well.
Leigh: Great. How did it feel, knowing that you didn't have that visibility or you weren't able to guarantee certain things for your customers?
Siddardha: Though we use a lot of people to ensure that we maintain rigor in the way deliveries happen, we still try to push hard using people to get these things done or have to deploy an additional workforce to ensure that these things are getting done well. But it continued to be a big problem because the cost which we incur to ensure good adherence to deliveries or adherence to giving the right inputs in terms of the distance traveled, etc. was really expensive. And as we started scaling to more and more customers, it was really apparent that we could not scale this way. As I said, It's a handicap and we just managed to get things done somehow, till we reached a certain point. And then we were clear that if we want to grow as an organization, or as a service, which millions of people across the entire country can depend on on a daily basis, this was absolutely not the way we could scale.
Leigh: What problems are you solving by using HyperTrack and what benefits have you realized?
Siddardha: We are trying to solve two major problems for our organization. One is around how do we have better reliability for our end customers by ensuring we have really tight tracking of our delivery executives. The second thing is the ability to have tighter control on the payout which we are doing to our delivery executives, which is dependent on the distance they have traveled on the ground.
For the first problem, which is the visibility of the delivery executives, we were running blind because we did not have any solution which could give us real-time visibility and continuous visibility of the delivery executive. So that was something which we were completely running blind, which got solved by HyperTrack giving us real-time visibility of where the delivery is getting is, what path is he taking, what is he doing right now, is he static somewhere, or is he moving, or is he driving on the road. So that is something which got solved really well.
The second part around the payouts, the major problem was the quality of inputs which we were getting from the delivery executives, it was really bad. They could fudge the numbers, they could share wrong numbers, trying to inflate their payouts. And this got solved really well because now HyperTrack has very metric-driven and real data to show that this is the actual distance traveled on the ground which should result in the actual payouts. So these were the two problems which we are trying to solve and got solved really well with HyperTrack
Leigh: Great, what features are you benefiting the most from and why?
Siddardha: The most important feature, of course, is the location tracking functionality, which is the core of the entire platform. This has translated to two products which we are using directly on a day-to-day basis. The first product is the ability to monitor and see the delivery executives on a real-time basis, which is helping us track their behavior and to drive improvement in their day-to-day operations. The second thing is the ability to understand the actual road distance they have traveled, which is directly translating to the payouts for us.
Leigh: Can you tell us about finding HyperTrack? What was that like?
Siddardha: So what we were looking for was not just a part of the solution, we were looking for a partner who could help us with the solution for the entire location stack. So the problems we are talking about is right from being able to capture location data from the delivery executive's phones, then taking it and storing it on the cloud, making it available in near real-time for our operations teams to understand what is happening on the ground, and also provide us advanced analytics capabilities to be able to understand in retrospective, like, what happened and what would have been better and get usable business insights in terms of what was the distance travel, how much time he is wasting, and so on.
So we basically started looking for partners, or vendors who could like to support us with this sort of location stack. There were a few partners or vendors out in the market who provided similar sort of solutions, different companies with different levels of maturity of the product. So it was clear that we had to work with like two, three players to understand the capabilities, understand how the team is, how they're supporting us, and how the technology stack can integrate with us to make like very clear business impact. So then we just went about looking for these partners. And then yeah, we came across HyperTrack and a bunch of other players. So that's how we first started off doing a discussion with HyperTrack.
Leigh: Great. What do you feel sets HyperTrack apart?
Siddardha: Right, I think the first thing which set HyperTrack apart was the ease of onboarding, and the support they started providing us from day one. The way they provided support, to help us integrate their plugin into our application, and then started working with us to understand what were the use cases we're solving for and ensure that they provide the right value for us about the problems we are trying to solve and to ensure that we were making the right impact to the business as well. So that is something that really came out very strong with our initial interactions with HyperTrack, which set them very clearly apart from the rest of the players in the market.
For the other players, in contrast, it was just a complete self-serve sort of thing, where we were expected to just try things out and see if it works or not. And then after when we were convinced of whatever they were providing us is when they said, OK, let's have the next set of discussions. And it wasn't clear how we should proceed forward or, like how they can add value to the business. So those aspects were something which was not very good.
Then the second part is about the technology, the core problem-solving part of it itself, it came out very clearly that they have made the entire process or the entire technology so seamless and so simple to use, that it was very easy for us to integrate, and start getting the visibility of how the delivery executives are moving. In fact, we had an engineer who just put the plugin on his phone, and then just started moving around the city. And then he came back and we looked at how the entire visualization was available for us, and how we could start deriving insights from even with a simple sort of input. The stack was quite robust. And we could clearly see that it had all the functionalities or majority of the functionalities, which were required for us to start driving impact at Supr Daily.
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?
Siddardha: HyperTrack is an end-to-end location stack for companies, which is especially useful for companies in the logistics space. They help capture the location data from the end-user and take it to the cloud, process it, do a lot of machine learning & data science on top of it to ensure the right sort of insights are available for the end-users along with real-time tracking and visualization capabilities of the users. So that's what I would say HyperTrack majorly does.
Leigh: Great. Can you talk to us a bit about how you and your team are using HyperTrack on a day-to-day basis?
Siddardha: So once we have integrated the HyperTrack plugin into our app, on a day-to-day basis, we have team leads who oversee the operations that happen on the ground. Now they have a very simple-to-use dashboard where they can quickly look at a specific delivery executive, where he's traveling, where is he stuck, what is happening, reach out to the delivery executive in case he's not moving forward, or getting his activities done on time. So that is one big win that helps us keep a very tight track on the people on the ground. The second aspect is the post-processing analytics outputs which we get where we are using HyperTrack's insights to understand what was the distance traveled by the delivery executives on the road, and which is directly going as input for the payouts of our delivery executives. So these are two ways by which we are able to directly drive business impact by integrating with HyperTrack.
Leigh: Great, what do you like best about HyperTrack?
Siddardha: I think, apart from the ease of integration of the application into our product, they have also provided various different ways to share these visualizations or data about the location tracking, which we could easily embed into our internal tools rather than depend on another third party tool or dashboard where we have to try and figure out [on our own]. They made it really easy for us to integrate their ecosystem into our internal dashboards, which made it very easy and convenient for our operations teams to use. So that's something which is really useful. The second thing is, of course, their team is extremely supportive. They have been supportive throughout this journey, to spend time with us, to dig deeper into problems, whenever we face issues or gaps in the data, they spend time and they are very responsive to take our feedback, improve on top of suggestions, and also debug and analyze things that could have gone wrong on their side and provide very quick solutions to them, which has helped us iterate over products across a few months and then reach a place where we are able to drive a lot of impact for our business. So I think the two things I really like about HyperTrack are the ease of use and also the support from their team.
Leigh: All right. So last section here. What results have you seen after implementing HyperTrack?
Siddardha: As I explained earlier, we have two key KPIs which we were tracking at Supr Daily which we wanted to impact or improve based on our integration with HyperTrack. One is our fulfillment rates and the second is the payouts, the quality and the accuracy of the payouts which we are doing to our delivery executors. So in both these aspects, we could like see good wins for the organization. One with respect to the percentage of deliveries which we could do without any issues has definitely increased because of our capability to track the delivery executive and understand his behavior. The second thing is also the noisy inputs, which we typically used to get from the delivery executive in terms of the payouts have now become much more streamlined, because we have HyperTrack which is giving us really accurate road travel data, which is helping us do better payouts for our delivery executives. So both these KPIs have moved forward really well and have helped the organization.
Leigh: Great. Would you recommend HyperTrack to others? And if so why?
Siddardha: Yeah, I would definitely recommend HyperTrack to other companies looking at solving similar problems. One of the most important aspects is that the technology and the complexity for solving location tracking are not trivial. It requires a lot of thought process in terms of design, architecture, system, and also scalability. So this is something which HyperTrack has solved really well and made it self-service for all their clients. This requires a lot of engineers, a lot of money, a lot of resources and a lot of time also to be invested from the companies to solve for themselves. So this is something that HyperTrack is solving out of the box and with very, very quick integration. So I think this is really great and it helps companies go from zero to one very, very quickly. So I think this is one of the greatest power of HyperTrack and I would definitely recommend this to other people. The second important aspect is the team itself. I think they have been super supportive right from the beginning. And they have been working very closely with us to understand our problems and to ensure that the solution which they are providing works really well for our business. I think these two together are a powerful combination, which will help any company succeed.
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