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What Do Uber and Logistics have in Common?

New Year’s Eve was the first time I used the Uber app. Late to the trend, I was extremely impressed with how easily the system worked. Even more so impressed with the system of tracking of Uber car locations and estimated time of arrival to your destination. While myself along with millions of other people, Uber is still a foreign concept, many consumers and business innovators have seen Uber as an opportunity for innovation and expand their current operations using the business model of logistics that Uber has created.

Retailers are looking to the Uber model as a way to strengthen the omni-channel fulfillment. Uber provides a service that instantly pleases the customer because it instantly provides. The second you request a Uber you are given options and based on them you have a service delivered within moments.

Using this platform of quick-delivery, other major companies are also beginning to apply it to their logistics. Amazon seems to already be flirting with the idea. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal called “Amazon Unveils One-Hour Delivery Service,” Amazon provided one zip code in Manhattan the ability to download Amazon Prime Now mobile application and soon after ordering an item through the application have bike messengers with the goods deliver it to the customer within an hour.

The international example is of Hong Kong’s Lalamove (originally called EasyVan), is an Uber-like service, but for logistics. It offers apps that allows customers to move their items across a city via a network of drivers. Lalamove is proving to be successful in the sense it is quickly expanding to out Asian countries including Singapore, Bangkok, Shenzhen, and moving into China and recently has raised $10 million USD to support these expansions.

Uber isn’t only a new, hip car service, it is the future of logistics and operations. It is the future of providing prime customer service and exceptional logistics solutions. Seeing Uber merge with retailers to deliver goods can’t be far from all this and more Uber-like services will become less and less uncommon.

-Riti Patel, Assistant, Supply and Value Chain Center

Sources:

1. http://www.supplychain247.com/article/what_can_retail_giants_learn_from_uber

2. http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/05/lalamove-10-million/

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