Parsel: Startup that aims to take the hassle out of logistics

When a startup launches itself with a big concept of say home chefs’ food delivery, it inadvertently gets so involved in the delivery aspect of their offering that as much 70 percent of the time and resources tends to get allocated for that. But delivery is not their core offering, the food cooked by home chefs is. This is the insight that sparked the idea of Parsel – the IT infrastructure services provider to the fragmented logistics industry. Speaking to Tech2, founder and CEO Himanshu Meena shares the more details about Parsel and what he aims to achieve with it. How big is your team? How do you sustain this business model? We are over 23 employees which primarily consisting of the technology development, sales operations, accounts and management. To understand business sustainability, it is essential to understand that the underlying resource (tempo/biker) that facilitates deliveries remains the same, while the service levels and demand visibility usually differs from case to case. Parsel’s technology acts as the bridge. It dynamically chalks out a plan to ensure optimum utilisation by routing demand to those resources who are free/less utilised, completely avoiding the manual intervention. Also, not all deliveries have on-demand requirements, there is a good chunk of scheduled deliveries - likes of fmcg/medical distribution, slotted deliveries, utilities etc. Being sector agnostic not only gives access to these but also lets us plan for better utilisation of the resource. We have built a huge resource base. To ensure their active participation, we have introduced an entrepreneur layer whose goals are aligned to Parsel’s. Further, on an organisational level have clearly defined internal and external objectives. While to the customers we promise to deliver as per their SLAs, internally we work to improve the capacity utilization of our resource. In short, by being sector agnostic to get more demand; we strike a balance between on-demand and scheduled deliveries increasing the capacity utilization per resource; enhance the assignment algorithms by analysing patterns. Additionally, we engage with partners / smaller entrepreneurs to ensure active participation of the resource and to incentivise betterment of operational and soft-skills. Are there any specific areas of technology that you keenly invest in? How are you making your services easy to use for the consumer? Logistics has been a pen and paper industry as far as we can recall. At Parsel we’ve focused initially at bringing the offline supply and demand side into the digital realm by giving them software to manager their fleet, automate payment procedures, given transparency into operations and in turn increasing the efficiency by reducing manual intervention. By simply bringing the current offline model into an automated online software system has resulted in an operational efficiency of 20% on the supply side and greater retention of clients for them due to the transparent nature of the software. Secondly the demand side has also benefited by the investment in software infrastructure for them. Most of Parsel’s clients in the need of recurring logistics need simply need to start using the software and they have the entire logistics infrastructure available at their disposal. Demand side also has access to the management side of operation, which in turn allows them to further reduce their internal overhead which are common problem in the industry. To take this further, since there is no silver bullet in terms of software solution, Parsel has dedicated itself in creating public APIs for the clients to consume. From the APIs, they can cherry pick the kind of logistic solution that suites their operational needs. This has been a key area for Parsel since clients look for perceived usefulness (enhancing performance) and perceived easy of use(free from effort) when they’re looking to shift from pen and paper to software platform. Moving forward, analytical insights into logistic operations is still in an infancy state. So along with analytics, we’re investing our efforts in creating solution such as relay systems, moving warehouses, collaborative usage of a resource and deeper integration with others point so the logistics value chain. The software environment designed at Parsel closely follows the 10 usability heuristics of Jakob Nielsen, the father of interface design when it comes to bringing an offline industry on-to an online software platform. There are number of items that we’ve focused upon. That includes giving all stakeholders a clear visibility into the system and keeping a close match between the real world of logistics and the system by replicating the flow of events as closely as possible. We give all users a level of freedom of use over their data and operation by offering high levels of customisation in the software via the APIs. We’ve ensured that users are guided by a viable solution each time they face an error in the system. The interface design has been created so that users can recognise the software system rather than having to recall the usage and locality of functions. There is ample help in terms of software/coding and documentation provided along with demos for the clients to come up-to speed with Parsel’s software Could you share details about the funding raised till now? What do you foresee in terms of funding for the future? We have raised a total of $2 million in two rounds. Our seed investor, Nimir Mehta, India operations for CLSA Funds, Singapore invested in his personal capacity with $1 million in September 2015. Another round of $ 1 million was pumped in in February 2016 as a bridge fund by Dr Mayur Desai, CEO Shaival Group. What are your growth plans and roadmap for the near future? To expand its business portfolio, Parsel is now using its customer purchase data and businesses data to increase its value. Information on purchase pattern, location, logistics flow patterns, along with the data created about inventory availability, sales patterns, along with supply and demand details will be utilised by the company for improved performance. What sets you apart from other similar offerings? Parsel delivers across platform for any type of delivery and not just food delivery. We do intra-city deliveries that enable transactions beyond a defined 5 km radius. We utilise both bikes and LCVs for deliveries helping movement of all sizes of goods. We also use LCVs to act as moving warehouses interjecting with relay algorithms to keep the delivery action running continuously. We are the only technology logistics startup to be gross positive currently. How do you plan to widen your reach? There could be multiple ways to explain the widening of reach. Geographically, we are catering to retail business demands only in Delhi NCR and Mumbai. Now we are working to expand this to cover Bangalore and Chennai by the next month and then work towards catering to the demands in tier 2 cities. We are employing the service provider model, which generates demands for us before we make the actual entry in city, so that we are in business from the first day. Expansion in terms of different sectors of clients that we cater is another plan of expansion we constantly work on. Currently there are two types of distribution models we work on- on demand and scheduled deliveries. So we are working on association with those industries where packaged group scheduled deliveries are based. In this endeavour we have tied up with a few prominent courier companies and an automobile spare parts delivery company to begin with. We are also working to increase reach by increasing the number of customers from the industry that are already being catered to successfully. So with Flipkart, Amazon and Snapdeal being the existing partners, we tied up with Myntra recently and looking to grow numbers with Snapdeal and working towards Ask me bazaar, Paytm and Shopclues to add to our customer base. Finally, in terms of acquisition to lead to a wider reach of business consumption, we are looking towards consolidation of the last mile delivery and are in talks to partner with smaller companies in the market.