This article first appeared in Digital Edge, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 13, 2023 - February 19, 2023

Consumers shifting from bricks-and-mortar stores to virtual shopping have put immense pressure on last-mile delivery services, which are battling tooth and nail to be more efficient and transparent to keep up with the burgeoning package volume and ever-growing consumerism.

This shift has also caused the local logistics industry to grapple with rising transport costs and labour shortage, which then greatly affects small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

“Malaysia is leading the pack in the last-mile delivery and logistics industry in Southeast Asia. E-commerce had also picked up during the Movement Control Orders (MCOs) during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic,” says Navin Kandapper, general manager of Pickupp Malaysia.

Founded in 2016, tech-driven logistics solutions company Pickupp has operations across Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. It provides logistics support to more than 24,000 businesses spanning multinational corporations (MNCs), logistics and e-commerce.

Being an all-in-one fulfilment service platform, Pickupp believes in scaling its business for SMEs. “The key fulfilment players in the market cater mainly for major fashion brands, major sports brands or businesses with thousands of stock-keeping units, which are not really what we are aiming for. We see fulfilment as more of an opportunity to empower small businesses and SMEs,” says Navin.

“We want to empower the smaller businesses in a sense that we don’t just handle their last mile but we can also automate the entire value chain and fulfilment services. It doesn’t matter that is it a SME or a micro business, because we are going to aggregate demand. We want to empower small businesses that currently don’t have access to the cost-optimised solutions,” he adds.

Pickupp’s platform includes storage options, inventory management and operations and warehouse consultation.

“All-in-one fulfilment is essentially for businesses that can’t store all their products and stock-keeping units (SKU) in their facility. They will look for a fulfilment service provider that will be able to store their products for them. [And] when they receive orders via their e-commerce platform, the fulfilment company would take the product or item and carry out the whole process, from labelling to packing. But on our side, our performance solution is entirely in-house, which is slightly different from what is seen in the market,” says Navin.

Other than providing the all-in-one fulfilment platform, Pickupps’s pick-up and drop-off (Pudo) outlets also give merchants, delivery agents and customers the flexibility to deliver and retrieve their parcels from a convenient and safe designated location. This reduces the risk of parcels getting damaged and chances of missing delivery hours. The company recently launched outlets in Skudai, Johor, and Melaka.

Contrary to last-mile delivery solutions and conventional logistics methods, Pickupp addresses the pain points many SMEs face in streamlining their fulfilment process, including cost, usability and scalability.

Data visibility and inventory transparency can be viewed on a digitalised dashboard that features live delivery monitoring and order history, which will assist businesses in garnering better insights for business scaling and customer management.

“We identify ourselves not really as a logistics company, but as a technology company,” says Navin.

The company leverages route optimisation software, dispatch algorithms and address recognition, which ultimately enables dynamic pricing for their clientele.

“It’s all proprietary software that we have built. And we use this to essentially offer solutions, which happen to be along the logistics line. But in essence, you know, we identify as a technology company. So, we’re a little bit different in the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) licensee space, in that sense. But that’s how our directory has been basically over the last few years,” he adds.

The entirety of Pickupp’s logistics and delivery features is easily accessible via Shopify and WooCommerce plugins at a reasonable rate. This enables business owners registered on these e-commerce platforms to manage and sync orders directly to their Pickupp dashboard; up to 1,000 orders can be automatically processed at a time.

Existing industry players, such as Ninja Van and nationwide courier companies like DHL and PosLaju, have already employed artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to ease customers’ experience through their platforms.

“I think AI use is a fairly common thing in the industry already, especially in terms of communication with users, but I think what we are a little bit different is the decision-making process before that. Everything from sorting, route optimisation, address recognition and finding appropriate pricing are all the automated parts where we are a little unique,” says Navin.

He is bullish that Malaysia will reach the smart automation market if there are proper risk assessments, looking at what value automation can bring to logistics, as well as providing scalable fulfilment solutions to small businesses as well, not just the industry giants.

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