Truck Lagbe, the Dhaka-based fast-growing logistics-tech company, started with a big ambition - making logistics solutions so efficient that it will eventually help reduce the cost of logistics and in turn help reduce the price of consumer goods in Bangladesh. To that end, Truck Lagbe has been pushing its enterprise logistics solutions, where it works with enterprises to provide smart logistics solutions. Truck Lagbe Enterprise Solutions, the offering called, is a relatively new service from Truck Lagbe. While the company has been working on the product for almost two years now, it launched the service just over a year ago. The response has been great, says the company. It now aims to take the service to the next level.
Truck Lagbe started with a consumer trucking solution offering. The company then launched a solution for SMEs. Working in these two markets helped Truck Lagbe refine its solutions and develop features like fixed prices for small vehicles within Dhaka where anyone can give their requirements, see the price and book a truck from the app within a few seconds. It also built a large pipeline of registered trucks on the platform to ensure the supply of trucks so that it could fulfill every order for trucks on the platform.
Now with a dedicated Enterprise Solutions, it comes full circle and becomes a comprehensive trucking solutions provider in Bangladesh. This is not to mean that Truck Lagbe was not serving enterprise-scale companies before the launch of Truck Lagbe Enterprise Solutions. It was. Anyone, be it a business or a customer, could hire trucks from the Truck Lagbe platform. The difference is that Truck Lagbe Enterprise Solution is a dedicated and comprehensive solution designed to meet the needs of enterprise clients.
Truck Lagbe had the opportunity to enter the enterprise market from day one. Instead, the company decided to wait until it has built a stable service and has everything in place to serve enterprise clients well. “Since I joined the business team, we wanted to bring big brands and enterprises to our platform,” says Nafees Ur Rahman, Head of Business, at Truck Lagbe. “However, Anayet bhai, our CEO, always told us to have some patience because the product was not ready yet to serve big clients. Instead, we took the time to prepare ourselves.”
For example, building enough supply was a critical milestone for the company. Because unless it could consistently fulfill orders, customers would eventually churn and stop relying on the service. Today, Truck Lagbe has over 60,000 trucks on its platform and the number is growing every day. The fulfillment rate remains excellent.
In August last year, it finally decided to launch a comprehensive solution for enterprise clients. From late last year, the solution has started to get meaningful traction. Over the past months, the service has matured and experienced meaningful growth.
The company took a systematic approach to develop the solution. Initially, it invested in building a dedicated team for enterprise businesses, training them, developing the process, and calibrating its capabilities to serve enterprise clients. It specially trained key account managers for enterprise solutions. Once everything was in place, it started approaching clients.
“Clients appreciate our way of doing things,” says Mr. Nafees. “We evolve fast and try to meet any need that our clients might have. We are flexible and try to serve our customers the best. Since we work with truck owners and drivers, we can collect and offer the best price to our customers.”
Today, Truck Lagbe serves a growing number of big enterprise clients from a long list of industries including consumer products, groceries, particles, food and beverage, toiletries, etc. The company has also been working with many major local giants with large business volumes.
Enterprise clients who need regular logistics solutions face a number of challenges. Although priorities and needs vary depending on the clients, there are underlying patterns. There are challenges like pricing and compliance. Safety and reliability often come on top. Enterprises look for whether the company is reliable. Whether the company can ensure the safety of their products and deliver them on time. They want to see whether they have enough trucks on their platform and can provide trucks on time. Timing is a huge problem in the trucking industry. Hence, enterprise clients pay a lot of attention to whether a company can provide support on-time.
The Truck Lagbe enterprise team worked hard to understand these needs and requirements of enterprise clients. The company then used the knowledge to develop processes, established norms, and designed interventions and features to address the myriad of challenges that enterprise clients face when it comes to logistics and trucking, which helped the company to design a solution that speaks to the needs of enterprise clients.
For example, for safety, Truck Lagbe sets expectations and acceptable norms when it enters into collaboration with a company that defines what happens when something unexpected occurs. The company takes measures to minimize the chances of anything risky happening, from training drivers to providing guidance on product stacking. “We ask our drivers not to rush because when you are driving on a broken road, products can get damaged if you rush,” says Mr. Nafees. “We ask and prepare our drivers to handle certain types of products with care. We follow-up with our drivers in the middle of every trip to check how he is doing and whether everything is moving smoothly. Drivers appreciate this because they also know that we care about them. We improve on routes. We improve safety and security measures. We suggest to clients the best practices. Due to these measures, it helps us to control the damages.”
After all these measures, if something still goes wrong, Truck Lagbe reconciles it according to the agreement with the client. The company says it takes responsibility when anything unexpected happens and works together with clients to minimize the chance of recurring such events.
Truck Lagbe maintains a strict registration process for trucks and drivers to ensure compliance, a key demand from enterprise clients. Since it does multiple rounds of verification, it could provide a fully compliant service.
The company currently serves more than 100 corporate clients and thousands of SMEs who are hiring trucks through the Truck Lagbe platform every day all across Bangladesh. Since it has enough supply of trucks, Truck Lagbe can fulfill demands on time.
Since the launch of Truck Lagbe Enterprise Solution, Truck Lagbe has been able to build an excellent relationship with its clients. Many Truck Lagbe clients appreciate the way it deals with clients, the language it speaks, and the way it communicates. The biggest differentiation for Truck Lagbe is that it does not operate and deal with clients like a traditional trucking company. When a client comes to work with Truck Lagbe, they experience this difference. Unlike many traditional trucking companies, Truck Lagbe hires people from the best educational institutions in the country and they deal professionally. The company says it operates from a different mindset, which is to serve the clients the best.
Working with Arla: The meticulous service has helped Truck Lagbe to win, retain, and increase business with many enterprise clients who initially started small with Truck Lagbe. Arla Foods Bangladesh is one of the clients Truck Lagbe has served successfully.
Initially, Truck Lagbe used to contribute only 2% of Arla’s logistics needs. Today, it covers almost 25% of logistics needs. Truck Lagbe has helped Arla to optimize their route and improve on their stacking.
When Truck Lagbe started working with Arla, it started from scratch by handling their small B2B deliveries and then some dealing from Chittagong port for them. Today, Truck Lagbe handles a large volume of their business.
Truck Lagbe has helped Arla with several challenges and route issues, which Truck Lagbe aims to do for every brand in Bangladesh and provide them a smooth solution in moving their products.
“When we approach a client, we begin with telling them about Truck Lagbe”, says Mr. Nafees. “We show our product. Share our vision, where we are aiming to take the company, and how we plan to do that. We tell our clients that the trucking hassles that you face, from the day we sign the agreement, is ours. You just give us the requirements, we take care of the rest.”
Truck Lagbe has built an experienced team who works on the backend to ensure a smooth running of the operation. For enterprise clients, Truck Lagbe has dedicated and highly trained key account managers just like the relationship managers in banks. The company provides a one-stop solution for enterprises. The company offers both fixed rates and spot rates to enterprise clients and they can choose the rate that they find suitable. The company provides a fully compliant service and maintains AIT, VAT, and everything legal.
Truck Lagbe enterprise solution provides a number of benefits to clients. On top of all these benefits is cost saving. “One of the things we promise to our clients is that if you work with us we will help you save upto 17% cost on logistics every year”, says Mr. Nafees. “We will evolve in such a manner that next year we are able to bring down your opex to a certain percentage. Since we have a growing pool of trucks on our platform and every day we have our own people in the field, we know prices and can offer a great rate.”
The biggest benefit Truck Lagbe offers is the price. Truck Lagbe has effectively eliminated middlemen from the system. And it connects truck owners with the businesses directly. The price is much more transparent. Since Truck Lagbe gets the price directly either from the driver or the owner and since there is no broker in the middle, it can give a good price that helps the client save money.
Truck Lagbe offers a sense of price predictability to corporate clients that is not available in the traditional market. Prices don’t go up when there is an emergency and you need a truck within a short time. With traditional agencies, companies often need to pay a higher price when they need a truck in an emergency, it is not the case with Truck Lagbe. In fact, Truck Lagbe ensures a better rate when a client is in need because the company sees it as an opportunity to serve the clients well and build a long-term relationship. The company says it has helped many clients in emergencies and never charge extra for that.
Truck Lagbe provides a number of services that no one in the market provides such as 24/7 supports and route optimization. “We are always thinking about how else we can support our clients”, says Mr. Nafees. Many of the best and largest companies in the country who work with Truck Lagbe now rely on their KAM for route optimization suggestions and to help improve overall logistical efficiency and deliver products using minimum time and money. Using the benefit of technology, data, and experience, Truck Lagbe can help enterprise clients to optimize their routes that effectively help reduce cost.
While working with enterprise clients, Truck Lagbe always aspires to help the clients address their most difficult challenges related to logistics. “There are routes across Bangladesh where many companies face trouble with sending trucks”, says Mr. Nafees. “When we start working with clients, we ask them to work with us with their most problematic routes and then we move up from there. We tell them you give me your most difficult route, let us work on it, and then we will move up from there. These are some of the challenges clients want us to address.” This approach helps Truck Lagbe to gather experience as well as gain the trust of a client relatively quickly.
Mr. Nafees accepts that Truck Lagbe does not succeed all the time in delivering excellent service to its enterprise clients. But it aspires to. “It would be an exaggeration to claim that we never fail,” says Mr. Nafees. “We do. We fail sometimes, say at about 10% times. But we aspire to serve our customers the best 100% of the time.”
