Making Proactive Operations a Reality with Locale 2.0

Getting a product into the hands of your consumers, just when they need them has always been a complex problem for physical businesses. City and Operations teams that work behind the scenes in this process largely depend on their intuitions and internally built tools to respond, when something goes wrong (more or less every day). Quite often than not, these responses are reactive.

If you talked to an Ops Manager anywhere in the world, they'd tell you that the only way to prevent something in their operations from breaking, is if someone magically warned them about what's about to break in their network, ahead of time.

With one of our biggest product updates in recent times, we're about to make a giant leap towards making predictive operations a reality, for you and your teams on the ground.

Introducing Locale 2.0 — World's first No-Code Control Tower for Data-Driven Operations teams.

Before we dive deeper into the future of predictive operations with Locale, it's important we take a took a quick look at some history first. Here we go:

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Why did we want to build Locale?

Our founding team started with a simple yet profound question:

“Why do companies managers need to go to analysts each time, to crunch their data and solve their problems? Can we not build a product to empower local operations teams inside these companies to solve at least some of these problems on their own?"

Operations teams are the critical links in the supply chains of physical businesses. However, operations managers even today rely on messy, cooler-coded excel sheets for reporting, mental maps for visualizing the distribution of service areas, broken internally built dashboards for monitoring key operational metrics, and WhatsApp, Slack, MS Teams, and sometimes, frantic calls to communicate with the people on the ground.

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This complex yet broken framework often leads to ops managers and city teams driving most of their everyday operational decisions by their intuition and contextual knowledge.

In situations where decisions have to be driven by data, ops managers end up spending most of their time shoulder tapping analysts for BI reports, which depending on how big your organization is, can take you anywhere between a few days to weeks to arrive at any conclusions.

We at locale knew this had to be fixed and with these insights from the world of operations in mind, we set out on a journey of building a platform that operations teams could call their own.

Suggested reading - Still using Tableau for your operations? You may want to reconsider!

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Mapping global commerce, down to the last lane.

If you've been following us, you'd know that Locale started out as a no-code analytics platform for operational data and focused on mapping operational data from multiple sources in realtime, into a single, seamless suite of map modules that enabled operations teams to:

• Go granular with their data
• Create key metrics on the go and run complex analyses with just a few clicks, without having to depend on engineers and analysts in-house.
• Assess the impact of their decisions on key performance metrics in realtime and,
• Go to the root of issues when something in their operations breaks, in a matter of minutes.

Locale made this possible through a suite of no-code map modules where users could slice and dice their operational data in real time. Some of those most loved features are:

Cohorts and Consoles: These essentially help you analyze all your geo-data along with the characteristics of any of your cohorts. For example: Identifying new serviceable areas based on the activity of your power users, Deploying fully charged/fueled vehicles in areas where users start long trips.

Heat Maps: Hex heat-maps are essentially your time machines on the cloud. It's a great way to visualize your supply and demand in real-time or in the past, at a geospatial level.

City Views: City dashboards give you a bird's-eye view of all the key performance indicators across all your service locations.

Lap Analysis: This console helps you visualize and analyze the back-and-forth movement of assets in your network between any two points. These movements could be anything from scheduled trips, deliveries and returns of your shipments, or even your workforce on the ground.

While these map modules we built, significantly reduced the time and effort involved in deriving insights from data and arriving at conclusions for our users, we still felt that operations teams cannot afford to be reactive in their approach and there was more to just solving this piece of the puzzle.

We wanted our end-users to be more proactive and collaborative in their approach to firefighting issues on the ground. Which essentially meant, we had to re-engineer the way modern operations were done.

Say hello to the world's first No-Code Control Tower For Data-Driven Ops Teams.

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The future of modern operations, in an all-new avatar!

After a rollercoaster ride spanning over 3 years, we at Locale are super excited to announce one of our major updates in recent months. We have given a major overhaul to the most essential features that simplify your operations every day.

This update is a giant leap toward our promise of proactive operations.

Introducing Real-time Alerts, Automated Incident Management, and Dynamic playbooks with Locale 2.0.

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What are Alerts?

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No kidding, this is exactly how the all-new Alerts feature is designed to work for your ops teams. While “Go granular” has been our mantra from the time we started building Locale, we’ve always been wary of the fact that insights from any kind of data mean very little unless they can prompt you to take action, and most importantly, measure the impact of those decisions eventually.

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You can now take charge of your operations like never before, by picking from a range of alert templates or setting up customized triggers for any of your entity or area-level metrics to get notified as to when things in your system start to break — in real-time.

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Here are a few examples of triggers that you now set up with just a few clicks, from your Alerts dashboard.

• Alert when cancellation rate goes above X in a given service area.
• Alert when stock-outs happen in a critical area.
• Alert when 50% of the bikes in areas have less than 20% battery.
• Alert when any bike has been idle for more than 3 hours.
• Alert when an RTOs in a given lane shoot up.

Suggested reading - Alerting 101: Setting up actionable alerts for your Operations— the right way

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Announcing Incidents — a single source of truth for your entire operations

Human behavior and decision-making are heavily affected by emotions – even in subtle ways that we may not always recognize. Imagine a firefighter keeping a tab on the number of gallons of water being spent while putting fire down. The physical and emotional stress involved in fighting fires will always stand in the way of operational excellence. This happens with your city teams too.

With Incidents, we intend to change this status quo.

In the upcoming update, we’ll be introducing Issue tracking and Automated Escalations to all your alerts. With these additions, Locale will act as a centralized system of records for your operations giving you and your teams end-to-end visibility on the problems that your city teams encounter on the ground every day, and more importantly, giving you the opportunity to not just track but also provide historical context on recurring issues.

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Operational excellence is a shared effort and with Issues, your operations will no longer have to rely on guesswork and intuitions. With everyone involved in your operations available in one single place, nothing that ever breaks in your operations will ever get lost in the noise or go unaccounted for — if an issue is open on Locale, it’s not yet fixed!

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Come, let’s do Operations differently with Locale ✨

The real world is chaotic, complex, and fickle. Today it's rain, tomorrow it's traffic due to a candle march, and a pandemic the day after. There is no way to predict this using data, hence, you need people who have that intuitive understanding of their areas and their behavior. To be able to react in time to these external factors, ops-driven companies need to build a very strong layer of collaboration amongst the right teams.

The right combination of data and human knowledge can create a system of intelligence that would become hard to replace externally or internally — Locale, at the moment is the only platform out there, that can help you achieve this goal, seamlessly and also pass this knowledge onto your next generation ops leaders and managers.

To conclude, in simpler words, the Locale way is the simplest your ops can ever get!

Still in doubt? let us clear them once and for all — Book a call with one of our specialists to have all your questions answered today!

📢 Psst.. While you were busy crunching your KPIs, we are silently working on rolling out Locale in an all-new avatar making it accessible to teams of all shapes and sizes.

Stay tuned to our Linkedin or Twitter page for regular updates and early access to offers on Locale 2.0.