Founded in 2013 by Kushal Nahata, Gaurav Srivastava and Gautam Kumar,
FarEye is SaaS-based mobility solution that helps in managing the Distributed Workforce Management Platform on mobile.
With FarEye, service organisations can (i) Assign and dispatch jobs to the workforce,
(ii) Get a 360 degree view of what’s going on the field and
(iii) Analyse the field operations.
Team BWDisrupt Interacts With Kushal Nahata, Co-founder & CEO, FarEye And Spoke To HimWhat is FarEye? How does it work? The challenge of any field service is managing an emerging day and to understand how to deal with the unexpected without compromising on the productivity or letting customers’ down. FarEye helps the field service organisations in driving the productivity by leveraging the power of an integrated dynamic scheduling and mobile solution that reduces travel and idle time. Also, with deeper analytics we help our clients in driving continuous improvement. FarEye streamlines the processes and ultimately increase the number of jobs/deliveries/visits completed per day per field worker.
With FarEye., the service organisations can allocate the right people to the right tasks and thus increase the number of tasks per day. Scheduling workers against shortest route between jobs can minimize travel time and maximise productivity. For e.g., if there are 100 workers carrying out 5 jobs per day, it gives 1 billion possible combinations of those how jobs could be allocated.
We use Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) algorithm, to allocate the appointments based on route and this reduces travel time and increase the productivity. With geographic plotting, locating the customer addresses is made easy.
By seamlessly integrating with existing workflow we ensure that the processes, people & data are streamlined. Also, we ensure that there is real-time coordination between the field executive, customer and the manager. With this the customers will get pre-stored messages & timely updates about their request. FarEye has the option to pre store messages and number which enable smooth communication and timely updates while the employee is on the move - customer is kept abreast/ kept in the loop.
Paperwork, rekeying data, manual workflows and not having access to key information are all factors that are detrimental to the productivity of your field workforce. With FarEye’s mobile solution., workforce is connected and the managers can gain an up to the minute view on activity and progress against schedule. In addition, field workers are able to instantly book repeat visits, order parts or schedule follow-up from the field, thereby streamlining processes. According to the research done by Aberdeen group, service organisations achieve an 88% performance in first time fix.
Apart from this, FarEye provides deeper analytics into field operations with Heat Map reports, Predictive analytics and performance reports. With this, the organisations can understand where to recruit more workforce, where new hubs are to be created, expected number of delivery requests, what is likely to happen next, where the demand is growing?
Impact on the end consumer with FarEye: Cost Reduction:
73% decrease in delivery complain calls
40% in field service cost
28% in fuel expenses
Revenue Increase:
23% first-time delivery
27% same day appointment
40% jobs per day
How did the idea came to start? FarEye started its operations in 2013 with Jabong-GoJavas as its client. Looking at the pain-points of the courier industry the three co-founders Kushal Nahata, Gautam Kumar and Gaurav Srivastava came up with an idea that helps in easy dispatching of jobs to the field workforce, provide real time coordination and analyse day-to- day operations. They sold their solution to Jabong-GoJavas without even making it. Their plan was brainstormed with the GoJavas team and was sold immediately – thus, FarEye was developed after getting its first client on board. It started off as a solution to solve the critical LMD issues but FarEye’s versatility & customizability made it conducive to any organization with distributed workforce. One day as usual they were in their office and randomly they were discussing on the courier challenges they see and the experience they faced etc. An idea triggered in their brains and they spoke to Rocket Internet venture Jabong about the idea. Then Jabong’s team immediately agreed to buy the product and this is how FarEye was sold without even making it. All this happened in July 2013 and there was no looking back.
What are the special key features of your startup?We are end-to-end Logistics & eCommerce solution. Though we have offer the flexibility to customise the solutions. Currently, we are offering customised business solutions to these industry pain-points:
1) Hyperlocals (all the five business models, Cooked Meals Delivery, Ordering from restaurants, Grocery delivery, Handyman & Home Services, Offers from local stores)
2) Market Place : Market Place solution has three business use cases in it:
(a) On-boarding of sellers,
(b) Sellers’ app : A mobile application will be given to the seller and it has two use cases : (i) If there is any order on the website it will be pushed to the seller directly and he will update the customer that the product is packed, dispatched, delivered etc.
(c) Delivery
3) Logistics : This has again three use cases :
(a) First Mile Pick-up
(b) Last Mile Delivery
(c) Reverse Pick-up (90 min pick-up which Jabong uses)
3) BFSI : The solution provided is for Sales force automation and it helps in capturing the information on the field.
4) Healthcare : Pick up & Delivery : (i) Picking up the collected blood samples from the patients, dropping them at the hub (ii) Delivery guy picks it from the hub and delivers it at the lab.
5) Consumer Durables : After-Sales & Process automation
6) Travel & Tourism:
(i) On-boarding of hotels
(ii) Front-office automation
How are you different from the existing ones?FarEye is a customisable & configurable mobile application and our USP is as follows:
(i) Process Engine –
Tool with drag-drop functionality to create industry specific workflow
(ii) Job Engine –
Create multiple job types each with different flows
(iii) Analytics Engine –
A deeper insight helps in increasing the performance
How do you monetizing? We charge based on transaction & also per license.
What were the challenges your startup faced while setting up the business?Few companies specially SMB’s doesn't know the importance of IT/automation and its impact in increasing the day-to-day operations.
The other challenges faced by us in the market are:
1) In-house software
2) Large Software companies - TCS/Wipro that provide solutions but are not customisable to the industry.
3) There are certain global companies (such as Click Software, JDA Software, Service Max.) which offer services similar as offered by the FarEye but they are not present in geographies that FarEye is present in and planning to penetrate. We face competition from Bringg, Ondemand, RapidValue, AssetTrackr that are companies developing dedicated Enterprise Mobility Solution applications.
What are the traction details? FarEye processes over 5 million transactions per day. It has more than 75 clients. The firm is expanding to European & APAC region.
What is the market size and market opportunity?With a mere 20% technology penetration in a workforce that is 3 billion people strong, FarEye looks ahead to a huge potential market that would benefit from its technology platform aimed at maximizing workforce efficiency, and consequently invert the statistics into a more favourable number. A massive adoption of the smartphone and businesses realizing that digital transformation is the sine qua non for growth in revenue and productivity, has made the enterprise mobility space undoubtedly the next big billion dollar opportunity. We have already introduced predictive analytics as one of the functionality on our platform and see ‘Wallets on Delivery’ and IoT as new value proposition for the industry.
FarEye aims to help companies and their workforce manages everyday operations in a much better and smarter way. In pursuit of this objective, we have partnered with Samsung – one of the world’s leading smartphone makers - and prominent financial partners to help our clients with a complete business solution that integrates mobile phone, its financing and the enterprise mobility platform to manage operations effectively.
