FAQ

Product

What is Locale?

Locale is a no-code control tower for your operations that enables central oversight with localized decision-making. We have built it from the ground up working closely with operations teams around the world and using the problems they faced on a daily basis as our reference and validation points. It is designed to handle all the moving parts of the puzzle and to actually help you solve them all at once. And most importantly, in collaboration with the rest of the team. Read more on it here.

When should you use Locale?

Locale is for every company that collects and relies on location data for making their on-ground operations more efficient. Companies in the growth stage find value in using Locale because of the ability to experiment quickly and measuring its impact. Big multinational companies find value in Locale because of its ability to integrate with their workflow without much friction and provide them. Locale frees up the bandwidth of the engineering teams by taking the task of creating and maintaining location dashboards off their shoulders. Read more on it here.

How can Locale be helpful when most decisions are algorithmic?

Algorithmic decisions might run well but there are still a lot of decisions where human involvement is needed, given the chaotic and fickle nature of the real world. There are also instances when operations teams need to monitor how different areas are performing. This exercise is done to find the gaps in the algorithms and take corrective measures.

Read more in the blog here.

Is there any requirement to use Locale?

Locale requires geotagged (having latitude and longitude values) data of different events along with timestamps that need to be ingested.

In case you have zip-code or area-code level data instead of lat/long values but think Locale would be valuable to your operations, feel free to reach out to us and set up a call. We would love to speak to you and explore it further.

Does Locale offer any predictive analytics?

Locale currently does not provide predictive analytics. However, with the anomaly detection algorithm built-in Locale, companies solve some of their problems preemptively. For example, in case of cancellations falling below a threshold level, companies can start taking corrective action before it reaches a maximum level.

How does Locale work?

Locale works in a very simple, 5 step process.

1. Raw location data collected by the companies is ingested in Locale using push or pull APIs. The integration process is very easy and quick. More on it here.

2. This data is processed and structured on Locale’s end in such a way that it becomes easily accessible for everyone.

3. Business users can then come and create their own dashboards comprising metrics and visualizations. This is a completely no-code process.

4. These metrics can be sliced and diced by time and geo to take important decisions. The team can set up real time alerts and even automate workflows. More on it here.

5. Once a decision is made, Locale provides the ability to immediately measure its impact.

You can also take a look at the short walkthrough video for further insight.

What kind of companies should use Locale?

Locale is not just a tool. It’s an entirely new way to run your on-ground operations for companies that have moving assets, be it delivery vans or executives, a cab or even a truck. Some common industries that find value in Locale are Mobility, On-Demand Delivery, E-Commerce, Long-Haul Logistics and FMCG & Supply Chain.

What kind of decisions can Locale help companies with?

Companies with moving assets on the ground rely on location data to take hyperlocal operational decisions. Typically, different teams make two types of decisions on Locale:

‍Incident Response: Our alerts feature helps operations teams respond to incidents in real time, be it increased demand in a particular area or vehicles lying idle for a long time in another. More on it here.

‍Strategic Decisions: Our granular visualization helps strategy and product teams take decisions on questions like where to open a new station or what user group to target with discounts.

Read more about it here.

Does Locale work with external data?

Locale does not offer external data as part of its product. But if the data is available with a company, it can be ingested in the product and can be used for analysis. In some cases, data can also be bought by Locale for the company from third parties depending on the data and the region.

You can read more about how Locale.ai can work with external data here.

Does Locale offer on-premise solutions?

Currently, Locale is only available as a SaaS product completely run on the cloud. We don’t deploy solutions on-premise.

Pricing & Support

What’s the pricing for Locale?

Locale is currently aimed at growth and mature stage companies with fleet on ground in mobility, on-demand delivery, e-commerce, long-haul logistics and FMCG & supply chain industries.

The minimum pricing for Locale currently stands at 25,000 USD a year. Our pricing depends on events ingested as well as the number of demand/fleet/order transactions. For more, contact our sales team here.

Locale sounds like a fantastic product. But wouldn’t its implementation and adoption take a long time?

We have seen that Locale’s adoption is usually very fast in the companies that we work with and the value delivery starts in no time. There are two reasons behind the same. First is that the product is very intuitive and requires no coding or prior knowledge on the part of the team. The second reason is our outcome-based approach to customer success where you get a team of consultants that understand your operations.

Here is how we ensure maximum value delivery at each stage:

‍Discovery Phase- Every engagement with Locale starts with a vision exercise where we sit with you and your teams to understand your pains, workflows & short and long-term business goals and come up with a vision document that outlines how those goals will be achieved with Locale. Here is a sample vision document for a typical on-demand delivery company.

‍Pre-Onboarding Phase- Your assigned consultants deep dive into your business operations and specific use cases to understand your workflows and customize the training programs for your teams.

‍Onboarding Phase- We work with your teams to ensure that not just you as a decision-maker but also the end-users across functions get familiar with Locale. enable them to make data-driven decisions, using your very own operational data. This includes customized manuals, checklists, onboarding calls and a 3-week long in-person training program.

‍Long-Term Value Delivery Phase- We ensure that value delivery is happening through things like monthly business reviews, quarterly adoption monitoring, on-demand refresher and advanced training and The Locale Promise of a 3-hour SLA time for all your questions via a dedicated Slack hotline.

Here is a detailed read on our approach towards customer success.

Integrations

Can I upload my own data to test Locale?

At this moment, uploading data to Locale is not self-serve. However, Locale runs a pilot program where companies can use Locale for a period of two months and see how it can add value to their business. To know more about this, feel free to reach out to us and set up a call.

What format of data is supported to integrate with Locale?

Locale supports CSVs, JSON, Parquet files at the moment. Typically, data files are stored in a specific bucket in S3 or GCS or other such services by different companies. Locale has integrations built with these services which allow it to pull these files directly in Locale’s S3 bucket. In some cases, companies can also interact with Locale’s S3 bucket via secret keys and access keys and push their data in Locale’s cloud.

What data is required to integrate with Locale?

Locale works on raw location data with lat-long and timestamps being necessary columns. Typically, companies collect three types of data which is geotagged:

‍Users data: Collected in a marketing tool like Clevertap, Amplitude and has data of events like searches, installs, etc.

‍Supply data: Location of riders/vehicles constantly relayed back to the company via GPS or other devices.

‍Transactions data: Examples include bookings, order amounts, delivery completion information, etc.

All this data is ingested into Locale and processed in such a way that operations teams can come and find insights easily.

How much effort is it to integrate with Locale?

Typically there is low to no effort involved from the engineering teams of companies to integrate with Locale. As long as the raw data is geotagged, structured, and has the necessary columns, there is no line of code to be written. The entire processing of data happens on Locale’s end. Here is a document explaining the integration process in detail.

Comparisons

How is Locale better than Tableau or other BI tools like Looker and Metabase?

BI tools, as the name suggests, are general-purpose analysis tools best suited for statistical charts and lack geospatial capabilities. Operational decision making on a BI tool takes massive engineering and analyst bandwidth. This is how the process currently works:

Creating location-specific metrics like user churn, delivery costs, delays, etc. requires complex SQL or Python that happens outside of Tableau or Looker.

Debugging the problem again takes multiple iterations and creating several reports as these tools are not built for getting hyperlocal insights.

These tools don’t support collaboration, sharing and teams end up using Emails, Slack, or Jira. As a result, the insights are not democratized to the entire company.

Decisioning tools are completely different from BI tools in most companies. Marketing, operations, and product teams use different tools for implementing decisions and the data needs to get passed onto them.

With all of this, teams don’t measure the impact of their decisions because the current infrastructure doesn’t allow for quick experimentation and iteration.

To conclude, all of this takes approx. 60 days to implement a decision and there is still no measure of impact. Locale is a real time ops control tower on the other hand. Here is a comparison chart for reference:

Why is Locale needed when companies have internal dashboards?

Engineering teams build and maintain internal dashboards which is a huge cost to a company. Moreover, the dependency on the engineering team to create new metrics for analysis makes the entire process much slower. Typically, companies take 60-75 days to create a single metric and this involves 5 different teams including data, operations, and engineering teams. Even after this, internal dashboards only solve for access to metrics while collaboration, taking the decision, and measuring impact is missing.

Here is a comparison chart for reference:

How is Locale better than Kepler?

In any decision-making process, there are 5 steps involved - creating metrics, debugging the problem, collaborating on top of it, making the decision, and measuring its impact. Kepler only allows operations teams to create a metric and debug the problem. However, with Locale, teams can also collaborate, take decisions and measure impact.

Kepler doesn’t have real-time capabilities, while with Locale’s incident response, your teams can respond to problems and bottlenecks in real time as they occur. Another reason why Kepler is not suited for high growth companies is that Kepler is not scalable. It needs the teams to manually upload data every time they want to look at something, while with Locale, there’s one-time integration only. Once a flow is set of the data, operations teams can come and use the product however they like. Here is a comparison chart for reference:

Why should we buy Locale instead of building another internal dashboard?

With numerous open-source options to pick from, building a custom analytics stack for your on-ground operations from scratch may appear to be an enticing option. However, you also need to consider that it is improbable that you will get the resources to build this vision of the perfect tool. One of the reasons is that investing in something that is not part of your core differentiator is probably not a great use of your resources in the first place. As your use-cases get diverse with scale, the volume and complexity of your fleet data will compound over time and most teams run the risk of either being left behind in terms of technology & reliability or going back to where they started.

Locale is the only operational analytics platform out there that is tailor-made for the workflows of your ops teams — however, it doesn’t end just there. Every single customer we partner with is onboarded by a dedicated and extremely empathetic customer success team, that is deeply invested in your success. You can use this framework to determine whether you should buy a SaaS product for your use case or build it internally.

Here is a comparison chart for quick reference:

Frequently Asked Questions