As Indonesia’s leading eCommerce solution for office supplies and industrial tools, Monotaro.id deals with thousands of deliveries on a monthly basis. Dealing with thousands of orders is no easy task. In an effort to make it easier to manage last-mile operations while simultaneously improve efficiency the company looked to technology as the answer. In less than 3 months, Monotaro decided to implement VersaFleet™ as their TMS solution to help streamline their delivery operations to help reduce the hassle during delivery. Monotaro also ended up using VersaFleet to help achieve their goal of expand their service across other Indonesian provinces.
A need to streamline the delivery operations
Indonesia’s B2B eCommerce, MonotaRO.id, is a one-stop solution for business procurement challenges in industrial tools and office needs. As an eCommerce platform that has been operating since 2017, the company was dealing with thousands of delivery orders. As a platform, Monotaro relies heavily on deliveries to ensure their goods reach their customers. With growing popularity of eCommerce, the number of orders were constantly growing and the delivery operations needed to be streamlined, especially the day-to-day operations, to ensure that the experience could be maintained or even improved despite the growing volume. With expansion in mind to cover the larger Indonesian geography, including Java & Sumatra, the company also needed a way to work across distributed team.
To achieve that goal, the company had to deal with numerous challenges, one of which is the complex process of tracking the orders, which requires the operations team to go back and forth to the customer service team, driver, and customers to check the delivery statuses of the items.
“Monotaro's challenge is to provide clear information regarding delivery statuses, as we already have thousands of customers; for example, when handing over goods to drivers, assigning for delivery; right after we hand over the items to the driver, we encounter difficulty to track whether the goods are still in transit or has been received by the customers."
Furthermore, with expansion in mind, the company needed to have a clear insight into their delivery data, which led to another challenge – data collection. Since the team was tracking many things manually, it was difficult for the team to keep & maintain records of their delivery data (% success delivery, % missed or % items that need for return). This in turn led to a challenge in predicting and forecasting future delivery costs.
Both of these challenges were exacerbated by existing system limitations. The previous system required the operators to manually input the longitude and latitude coordinates, a very time-consuming process that was both inefficient and ineffective.
These were the main challenges that led Monotaro to look for a TMS solution to help solve their problems.
“Our [MonotaRO] previous application was too complicated, the steps were too long… [Our] previous system required us to input the coordinates manually."
Achieving a seamless and efficient delivery process
With VersaFleet as their TMS solution partner, MonotaRO was successfully able to overcome their challenges and provide a better delivery experience both for their customers & their own internal team.
By using the VersaFleet TMS, all the MonotaRO teams, from operations & customer service, were able to track orders and items’ whereabouts in real-time. MonotaRO is also able to relay live-time delivery updates to their customers, keeping them informed on when they can expect the delivery to arrive. The ability to do real-time tracking helps the MonotaRO team to cut down a lot of time going back and forth between the many parties like the customer service team, driver, and customers.
In addition to the real-time tracking, MonotaRO can now capture comprehensive data on their deliveries. With the ability to collect data, the operations team now is able to monitor & analyse their operational performance. MonotaRO teams are now able to effectively come up with KPIs for their delivery. With so much data available, they now actively review their KPIs on a regular basis and are also able to refine the metrics that they wish to track. Using the data available, the team is able to better predict delivery costs and can take appropriate steps to manage their cost-efficiently.
“...Data is required. By having data, we can have a better understanding of how long it takes for an item to reach the customer, the time for handover and the time a driver takes to complete delivery. These are really useful information for us, especially in evaluating things like fleet efficiency and costs. This helps us estimate the long term cost-efficiency."
One of the functionalities that VersaFleet TMS has that most benefited the team was the fact that the software could help to find the longitude and latitude coordinates of all the addresses and visualise all of this on a map automatically, which greatly helped the team to cut down on the the working time. Before VersaFleet TMS, the team would search for all the address coordinates manually and plot them on a map to give them an idea of the delivery density across multiple areas. With software, these two processes, both of which were heavily time consuming were no longer necessary.
As a result, MonotaRO was able to save a lot of time, therefore allowing the team to operate in a significantly more efficient way. The team is able to use the time saved on other parts of the operations, focusing instead on ways to improve, instead of getting stuck in the day-to-day hassle of operations. This has resulted in an overall 10-15% improvement in both delivery efficiency and productivity.
“With VersaFleet, we can cut the working time, streamline the hand-over and it's loading by using the application. In addition, the information provided to customers will no longer need to be updated manually. When preparing weekly KPI reports, it is clearly much faster to extract the data from VersaFleet. After adopting VersaFleet, we have increased our productivity and efficiency by 15%."
The success of MonotaRO.id in overcoming its last-mile delivery challenges served as a positive step towards helping the company scale and expand its service in many more regions across Indonesia.
Learn more about the VersaFleet TMS benefit here: versafleet.co
