Sim Shagaya, founder of Konga.com has announced that the online mall will be introducing Mercury, a new powerful hosted logistics management system (LMS) this week. He stated this via a tweet on his page. He also said that Mercury will be free to SMEs that wish to do logistics and will be usable regardless of if you are doing deliveries for Konga, other ecommerce company or a offline fulfilment.
This development is healthy for the ecosystem; big companies finding creative ways to give back to the community. Konga gradually transitioned from typical online retail to online marketplace, and even franchised its delivery business. One can easily see this as a way for it to help its partners who will now have to do the delivery themselves.
As an operations (Supply Chain Management and Information Technology) professional, I also see an interesting angle to this all. Imagine if 30% of deliveries are done using this free LMS. It could be another big win for Konga in many ways; Konga will have priceless data. It will know which routes are most used, which vehicles are most used, which locations are most visited, the best time to do a delivery based on the number of successful,and unsuccessful transactions. It will have deep insight into customer service and customer behavior. It will have business intelligence. Insights it could monitise in very creative ways.
What are your thoughts? And has anyone had the chance to use it yet?
