Funding to Boost Brands with Logistics Engine

The logistics engine of Locad provides a cloud supply chain for brands to store, pack, ship, and track orders for ecommerce and omnichannel retail through a tech platform connecting a network of warehouses and shipping partners. Locad has announced it has raised an $11M Series A funding round to expand their supply chain platform that allows modern consumer brands in Asia-Pacific to automatically store, pack, ship and track their orders in a distributed, end-to-end supply chain as-a-service. The $11M Series A raised will be used towards network expansion, product development, and hiring talent across Asia-Pacific. The round was led by Reefknot Investments, a fund anchored by Temasek and logistics powerhouse Kuehne & Nagel.

Locad’s platform, dubbed the logistics engine, syncs inventory across sales channels such as Shopify, Lazada, Shopee, and TikTok Shop, and orchestrates end-to-end order fulfillment for B2C and B2B orders, from storage to delivery, through a network of warehouses and shipping partners. To date, Locad has served over 200 brands across Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia, and shipped more than 2 million orders while maintaining a 99% same-day order fulfillment rate.

“Ultimately, our goal is to enable a frictionless movement of physical goods and data across the supply chain for any brand and merchant, enabling anyone to sell anywhere, on any sales channel, and deliver seamlessly.” says Locad CEO and Co-founder Constantin Robertz, “As modern consumer brands are transforming to direct-to-consumer and omnichannel retail, we have seen that the supply chain and fulfillment infrastructure is a key barrier to scaling the business for many brands, and the bar is only rising further, due to higher customer expectations for fast delivery, and the complexity driven by an increasing number of sales channels.”

The series A funding round also saw participation from returning investors Sequoia India and Southeast Asia’s Surge, Febe Ventures, Antler, as well as new investors Access Ventures, JG Summit, and WTI.

“We are excited to partner with Locad to bring holistic end-to-end e-commerce logistics solutions to brands across Asia Pacific.” shares Ervin Lim, Vice President of Reefknot Investments, “Locad’s unique operating model of localizing warehouses into the cities ensures that inventory is kept close to the customers thereby enabling significant cost and time savings for both brand and consumer. We believe that Locad’s logistics engine will spur greater participation in the digital economy as consumers outside of Tier-1 cities can now receive their orders 2-3x faster at a fraction of the usual cost.”

Locad’s logistics engine provides the backbone to support the e-commerce and omnichannel growth of global consumer brands such as Havaianas, Reckitt Benckiser, and Emma Sleep in the region, while also expanding access to best-in-class logistics infrastructure to growing D2C brands and mid-market merchants.

“Success in omnichannel commerce for modern consumer brands requires a powerful supply chain orchestrated by software that seamlessly integrates the infrastructure of warehouses and shipping carriers. And that’s what we’re building here at Locad” added Constantin Robertz.

Committed to democratizing the back-end supply chain of e-commerce, Locad will use its $11M Series A funding towards building the region’s largest fulfillment network. The company is adding warehouses, partnering with transport operators, and hiring talent across the region to scale in Southeast Asia and Australia.

“Over the next 5 years, we expect to build the region’s largest network of warehouses, enabling next-day delivery in Tier 1 to 3 cities across the region, and make this available to brands and merchants in one integrated platform” concluded Constantin Robertz.

Locad is a logistics engine enabling e-commerce brands with a cloud supply chain to grow their omnichannel business and automatically store, pack, ship, and track orders across Asia-Pacific.

Locad’s tech platform syncs inventory across online channels and organizes end-to-end order fulfillment through their reliable network of warehouses and carriers across Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Australia, with more locations opening soon. Through this, brands and merchants get a geographically distributed warehousing infrastructure that allows them to stock goods closer to customers, enabling faster delivery at lower cost.

 

200 Million Robot Landmark

AMR maker Locus Robotics is celebrating a picking milestone that cements its place as a key player in fulfilment logistics, reports Paul Hamblin.

Locus Robotics, which manufactures autonomous mobile robots (AMR) for fulfilment warehouses, has achieved a major milestone in its relatively short history with the announcement that its robots have completed their 200 million units picked landmark. The milestone, achieved by a company in the UK, came during the pre-peak season period leading into the critical Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales period. Read the whole article here.

“We are thrilled to have reached the 200 million units picked milestone,” said Rick Faulk, CEO, Locus Robotics. “As more and more shoppers move online, and as we quickly approach what is expected to be the biggest – and most challenging – holiday retail season yet, retailers are turning to AMRs to innovate to meet growing demand and avoid risking losing valuable customers.”

The 200,000,000th pick occurred at a Boots UK warehouse facility, and the item picked was a Cuticura Original Anti-Bacterial Hand Gel. Boots UK is a leading health and beauty retailer and
pharmacy chain. It is part of the Retail Pharmacy International Division of the Walgreens Boots Alliance, Inc. “The flexibility of the Locus system to scale as the demand grows has been key to our success,” said Ken Hall, Supply Chain Development Manager, Boots UK. “The autonomous nature of the LocusBots has also been instrumental in worker health and safety, enforcing social distancing through such a busy period while also delivering significant productivity improvement.”

The COVID pandemic has quickly transformed the global retail industry, making online and omnichannel purchasing the new standard worldwide. The explosion of online shopping has put increasing pressure on fulfilment companies to staff their fulfilment teams adequately to meet the growing number of orders and ensure that items are picked and packed as efficiently as possible. These trends will continue as the 2020 holiday shopping season approaches. According to recent reports from Adobe, Cyber Monday sales are expected to hit a record-breaking $9.4 billion (£7.35
billion), up almost 19% from last year, and Black Friday sales online are expected to be $7.5 billion (£5.86 billion), up 20.3%.

Locus Robotics’ industry-leading robotics fulfilment solution enables brands, retailers, and third-party logistics (3PL) operators to easily meet higher order volumes and the increasing
consumer demand for e-commerce, retail, omnichannel, and manufacturing order fulfilment. Customers worldwide, including CEVA, DHL, Boots UK, GEODIS, Port Logistics Group, Verst
Logistics, Radial, and others, see doubling or tripling of fulfilment productivity and lowered labour recruitment, training, and retention costs.

Powerful and intelligent autonomous mobile robots operate collaboratively with human workers to dramatically improve piece-handling productivity 2X- 3X, claims the company, and with less
labour than traditional picking systems. This award-winning solution aims to help retailers, 3PLs, and speciality warehouses efficiently meet and exceed the increasingly complex and
demanding requirements of fulfilment environments, easily integrating into existing warehouse infrastructures without disrupting workflows, instantly transforming productivity without transforming the warehouse.

Exchange 2020

Manhattan Associates’ annual EMEA get-together for customers and partners – staged online instead of Berlin, as planned – offered plenty of useful insights into industry trends. Here are some highlights.

Supply chain, inventory and omnichannnel software specialist Manhattan Associates has come a long way since its June 1990 founding (at Manhattan Beach, California) and can celebrate its 30th birthday with a huge roster of some of retail’s biggest global names on its client list. Its Active WMS Solution is marketed as “the last WMS you’ll ever buy” (see interview in Logistics Business,
September 2020) and with nearly $600M in R&D spend over the past decade, it has the heft to back up the claims.

Unsurprisingly given the fast change in retail buying habits, Europe has been richly fertile for Manhattan Associates over the past five years. This year EMEA SVP Henri Seroux hosted the
company’s annual Exchange event for EMEA partners and customers (previous venues have included Barcelona, Amsterdam and Paris, with Berlin originally planned for this year) via a slick studio presentation, complete with live feeds to Singapore and Australia.

Seroux believes the pandemic has proven that cloud solutions are the right ones. He advises companies to rely on the cloud and invest in it. “The latest generation of cloud solutions delivers
exactly what companies need in a crisis such as this: unlimited elasticity, agility and speed. Companies don’t have to buy extra hardware when volumes double, it’s already there. If you want to benefit from innovation, you don’t need to upgrade the system first. New functionality is (almost) immediately available.” He recounts a customer story: “What happens if your central distribution centre has to shut down for quarantine reasons? Because that is exactly what happened to the American jewellery retailer Kendra Scott. The team at Kendra Scott were already running their unified commercial processes on Manhattan Active Omni, so they were able in just nine days to mobilise the inventory of their closed stores to fulfil and ship the online orders.”

Another key theme for logistics in the post-pandemic world is the potential for localisation of supply chains and manufacture. Seroux is not convinced. “Globalisation has given consumers in Europe and elsewhere a lot of purchasing power. The costs of buying a sweater, sofa or TV set are comparatively much lower than about 30 years ago. It’s an illusion to think that we can reclaim production on a large scale in order to start production here at much higher costs, just to minimise the risks and guarantee the supply.

“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take measures to reduce our dependency on, say, one country, for example. We will have to diversify our supply chains and this diversification will in turn increase resilience. But fear not, this isn’t something that will just happen overnight, we’re talking about gradual, longer-term changes.” Every retailer or brand has to make its own trade-offs. “They will have to ask themselves how they should solve dilemmas: shorter and faster supply chains offer the benefits of quicker cycles to adjust to demand, but could also come with higher economic and environmental prices. Everything will have to be more flexible including inventory deployment. We will have to integrate our transportation, warehousing and unified commerce systems to be more agile and efficient.”

Read the whole article here.

Agility and efficiency were words that cropped up several times in a later Exchange presentation given by Clint Reiser, Director of Supply Chain Research at ARC Advisory Group. Revealing the results of an industry survey carried out just before the pandemic, he painted a picture of a sector on the cusp of a technological transformation, driven by the march to digital shopping. Survey respondents were divided roughly equally between 3PLs, retailers, manufacturers and wholesalers. Asked to assess which order fulfilment channels they expected to grow either ‘moderately’
or ‘extensively’ in the next three years, 51% of all respondents expect Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) to increase extensively, with DropShipping second on the ‘Extensive’ list at 24%. Significantly, in both cases 3PLs and retailers had higher expectations of growth than manufacturers and wholesalers. Unsurprisingly, all expected much greater piece picking in the 1-3 years ahead, with only 8%
of respondents suggesting that pallet picking will grow extensively. Reiser pointed out that the obvious result of this huge increase in piece picking will be more complexity in the warehouse and, almost certainly, greater cost.

With regard to adoption of technology and automation, 60% of respondents said that they were “very likely” to invest in such technology in the next three years. Crucially though, a whopping 96% said that they also expected the value proposition of such technology to become more applicable (ie more cost-effective) in the next three years. The drivers for their pursuit of automation technology were given as labour shortages (57%), an increase in throughput requirements at the warehouse or DC (48%) and labour costs (46%). One could speculate that pandemic-driven unemployment in other sectors, such as hospitality and travel, may put a cap on labour costs because warehouses may have a larger pool to fish in, certainly in the near term. This could be countered by acknowledging that the long-term trend towards expectation of labour shortage is clearly established. Meanwhile, automation options offering flexibility and scalability are increasingly
available to supply chain managers.

Asked what specific technology they expected to employ, 65% selected conveying and automatic sortation, followed by small shuttle systems (56%). Of the emerging technologies, there was a clear move towards robotic case picking, seen as supporting broad omnichannel needs including pallet picking. Collaborative robot systems and zonal solutions scored broadly the same at around 40% expecting implementation in the next three years. Single-vendor solutions were not strongly favoured – Reiser suggested that perhaps respondents see it as a “nice to have, not a need to have”. There was no question – and this shouldn’t be a surprise at a Manhattan Associates event – that in the software sector, WMS is seen as mission-critical, with 80% expecting to invest in such
technology in the next three years. Again, agility and responsiveness are the keys.

State-of-the-art Omnichannel Solution for Dutch Retailer

Vanderlande has delivered an advanced automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) to the Dutch organic food retailer Udea, one of the most unique of its kind that Vanderlande has supplied to date. The innovative solution is housed in Udea’s new distribution centre (DC) in Veghel, The Netherlands, and has this week processed its first orders. It consists of a goods-to-person ADAPTO system, omnichannel picking stations and smart item robot (SIR) technology.

Udea is a wholesaler of organic foods, natural personal care products and sustainable non-food items. The company is also the franchiser of the Ekoplaza chain of organic supermarkets and online grocery shops. For its new centralised DC, Udea needed a state-of-the-art automated solution that provided the necessary levels of availability, performance and reliability to match its omni-channel needs.

Other criteria had to be considered, including capacity, user-friendliness, ease of maintenance and energy consumption. A goods-to-person system was also required that featured ergonomic workstations. Udea was looking to combine the activities of its existing DCs into one facility, and as such, the new DC in Veghel will house all of the company’s dry, ambient, chilled and frozen products.

Vanderlande’s ADAPTO system enables efficient and fast delivery to stores (B2B) and consumers (B2C). At 12-metres high, ADAPTO contains three temperature zones that can handle a wide range of products – a first for the market. ADAPTO uses double-deep storage for the optimum use of space and provides a high throughput of fast-moving goods. Alongside eight ergonomic decanting stations, there are 12 picking stations, all of which have raised platforms to facilitate ergonomic order picking.

A continuous flow of orders is assigned to the goods-to-person workstations. Operators can pick the instructed quantity for both consumer and store orders, with SIR technology automatically picking part of the order. This results in Udea processing 10,000 SKUs and picking 120,000 items per day. This is supported by a warehouse management system from partner Consafe Logistics with whom Vanderlande collaborated strongly during the development and testing phases.

“We are more than happy to collaborate with Vanderlande – it’s been a joint effort for success,” says Udea’s General Manager Erik Does. “They helped us successfully with the technological challenge to create an automated warehouse with multiple temperature zones.”

Vanderlande’s Executive Vice President Warehousing and Parcel, Terry Verkuijlen adds: “We have been especially proud to have partnered with Udea on this project. The installation – for one of our neighbours in Veghel – has created a unique opportunity to demonstrate our technology around the corner in a fully operational omnichannel DC. Udea has a clear vision on creating a more sustainable food chain, and we are happy that our solutions have been selected as an intrinsic part of their food retail ecosystem.”

Pictured: From left to right: Erik-Jan van den Brink, Director, Udea
Karel Hoogenboom, Sales Manager Warehousing, Vanderlande
Terry Verkuijlen, Executive Vice President Warehousing and Parcel
Erik Does, General Manager, Udea

Inventory Allocation with Omnichannel-Centric Solution

Manhattan Associates Inc., a leader in supply chain and omnichannel commerce, today introduced Manhattan Active® Allocation, the first allocation solution specifically engineered for today’s omnichannel marketplace, with a fresh approach to managing short lifecycle inventory. A leader in inventory optimisation, Manhattan is the first to apply this expertise to softlines retail, with a new solution that also improves allocator agility and responsiveness.

Traditional allocation solutions lack the ability to sense and respond to today’s complex retail environment and evolving shopping habits. Manhattan Active Allocation offers a more nimble and modern approach to inventory allocation of short-lifecycle products for apparel, footwear and other fast-fashion retailers. It offers allocators a better understanding of real demand by giving them direct insight into today’s omni-fulfillment strategies, like BOPIS and curbside pickup. The solution also has the unique ability to shape allocation decisions based on the distinct types of fulfillment experiences offered for each product at both the store and distribution centre level.

“Manhattan has reimagined the entire allocation process with the notion that today’s retailers must better align inventory deployment decisions with how the brand intends to engage its customers,” said Scott Fenwick, senior director of product strategy, Manhattan Associates. “For the first time, allocators will have the ability to make allocation decisions pre-season, before inventory hits the stores, and in real time during the selling season, leveraging granular omni-fulfillment insights. This will give them the ability to align their short-lifecycle inventory plans with their omnichannel fulfillment strategies, resulting in fewer fulfillment redirects and end-of-season markdowns.”

Read more about WMS from Manhattan here https://flickread.com/edition/html/index.php?pdf=5f3d1fcf3160d#26

Built on industry-leading Manhattan Active application architecture, Manhattan Active Allocation is always current, continuously adapting and automatically scaling and flexing to accommodate changing needs as a business grows. The microservices-based, cloud native solution never needs to be upgraded, yet is still fully extensible. The new solution delivers real-time performance monitoring and updates to inventory and sales, network wide. Inventory performance is automatically captured by channel and fulfillment type, and configurable allocations help users define, preserve, learn and reuse high-performing fulfillment strategies year over year.

Manhattan Active Allocation’s embedded analytics and data visualisations give retailers the agility to instantly respond to changing business conditions and dynamically evolve their allocation strategies to maximise sales and margins. The solution gives allocators the agility to create adaptable allocation plans, which result in less stranded inventory and less financial risk for the business. http://www.manh.com

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