Nigerian startup Delivery Science is using its Fieldinsight product to help consumer goods companies gain insight into smarter deployment of their people, assets and products out in the field.
Delivery Science was founded in 2014 after co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Lanre Oyedotun’s haulage business was dealt a huge blow by a driver stealing a product that was to be delivered to a customer.
Oyedotun looked for a solution to such problems, and when he couldn’t find one locally, decided to build it. The result was Fieldinsight, a mobile solution that helps organisations gather relevant data, and manage and monitor field activities through near real-time visualisations.
It helps companies know more about their target customers by collecting data about them in a structured way, accept orders from customers from the field and online, accept payments, and obtain real-time information about delivery of goods and services.
“Eighty per cent of the workforce in businesses operate in the field. These range from field sales, to delivery personnel, to distributors. Our goal is to help these people work more efficiently,” Ore Omolaja, VP for distribution at Delivery Science, told Disrupt Africa.
“For businesses who have limited facts and visibility over their field operations, Fieldinsight enables the collection of data in the field using mobile and IoT devices, stores it offline, and forwards once it is connected to the internet.”
The startup was one of those selected to take part in Google’s first Launchpad accelerator in Africa and 2017, and has grown its team to over 25 people. It has raised a host of funding rounds over the last few years, and is planning on expanding to neighbouring countries after seeing strong uptake in Nigeria, where it operates a subscription model.
“We identified that within the supply chain and logistics space is a considerable information lag between individuals who work in the field and executives in the office,” Omolaja said. “This is largely due to the inefficiencies during data collection at every stage of the supply chain. We discovered that the lack of infrastructure, data connectivity and lack of data collection standards were contributing factors towards these inefficiencies.”
