How the Leading Delivery Management Platform Fought COVID-19 by Providing Tools for Other Businesses to Survive

Andrew Mukerjee, founder and CEO at eLogii and Brisqq Group tells us about delivery management during Covid-19.

Tell us about you, your career, and how you founded eLogii?

Andrew Mukerjee: After graduating from King’s College London, I started my professional life as an investment banker – focused on software and internet transactions. But then in 2015, I noticed something. I saw how fragmented and broken the local delivery market was in the UK. The gap was there, and I had a genuine desire to do something about it.

Out of that desire, we built Brisqq into the leading tech-enabled last-mile delivery business, raising c.$6m and scaling extremely rapidly. The business is 100% asset-light and based on a crowdsourced model. Our Brisqq delivery service is enjoyed by 1,000s of businesses and their customers, including many of the largest brands in the world, and is now doing millions of dollars of profitable annual sales.  Based on that success (and our experience), we wanted to take it a level further and this lead to the birth of eLogii – the leading SaaS platform for Planning, Route Optimization, and Execution.

How does eLogii innovate?

Andrew Mukerjee: After only c.1 year in the market, eLogii is a powerhouse with customers large and small across Europe, North America, and Australia. But the real strength lies in how the solution operates. eLogii is an end-to-end solution. We applied our own experience to develop a solution that can help businesses, regardless of their size and industry. The platform automates the entire planning and management of the delivery lifecycle. From routing and scheduling, through optimization, to dispatching and managing forward and reverse delivery logistics in real-time. And at a granular level, as well. This was previously unseen and reserved only for deep-pocket enterprises. We take pride in ensuring we always remain at the forefront of innovation enabling our customers to integrate pretty much any external platform enabling an almost unlimited number of use cases in the distribution and field services areas.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business and how are you coping?

Andrew Mukerjee: Everything has changed since the outbreak of COVID-19, hasn’t it? For some businesses it was a disaster, fortunately for us, it was a big opportunity. As people were locked down at home, businesses had to turn to delivery to serve their customers. Many businesses already had some kind of fleet capacity if they’d been involved in distribution, but they needed to get a lot more out of each of these resources. Enter: eLogii which has enabled countless businesses to gain greater efficiencies out of their distribution operations.

Our delivery management solution is the right tool that emerged at the right time that could help businesses across the board minimize losses and make their operations more resilient to the general disruption caused by the coronavirus.

Did you have to make difficult choices and what are the lessons learned?

Andrew Mukerjee: Of course. It’s not every day you launch a new product in the midst of the greatest pandemic in the last hundred years.

Picking where to focus time and which feature sets to develop into the product are always big ones in the software world. We were fortunate in so far as we had plenty of opportunities coming at us, but we needed to sort through the ones that were going to create the most value – for our customers (and 1,000s of future customers alike), and as a result also for our business.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

Andrew Mukerjee: Well, eLogii is definitely the tool that can help distribution and field services businesses navigate this crisis! All kidding aside, I think we’re like everyone else. We had to shift towards remote work. So like every other business on the planet, we rely heavily on Google Suite, as well as Zoom and Slack for communication.

There are certainly opportunities when it comes to a fully remote world, but there are also challenges when it comes to management across timezones and without being able to interact face to face with your team around a table. That said, we’ve learned quickly and adapted and continue to learn when it comes to gaining efficiencies in this new way of work.

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Andrew Mukerjee: I have to say we don’t really spend a huge amount of time obsessing over the competition. Our customers are saying nice things about us and are getting genuine value from our solution (in some cases cutting 50% of operational direct and indirect costs) – so they are our focus.

If you look at the landscape though, you see a bunch of solutions – some bigger targeted at the Enterprise – these are usually expensive, sometimes slightly older-school, and quite complex. At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got cheaper, simpler, and nicer looking (from a user interface perspective solutions) – these are usually not suitable for managing operations beyond a certain size.

We feel we are completely uniquely positioned – we’re new enough to have a lead when it comes to employing the very latest technologies in a clean, elegant package without the baggage of legacy and on the other hand our solution also has a maturity way beyond what would be normal with a product of this age. Put differently, eLogii has all the power and more of the larger more complex solutions, while at the same time having usability and affordability in line with the more modern, simpler solutions… a true best of both worlds and something very difficult to emulate.

Your final thoughts?

Andrew Mukerjee: Stay safe! I think it’s important now more than ever for everyone to abide by this. And a thank you to all of you at startup.info for the invitation.

Your website?

https://elogii.com/