Gray Routes Technology: Enabling Location Analytics to Resolve the Age-old Problem of Locations for Enterprises

“Founded in 2013, Gray Routes USP is geospatial data and affordable tools for territory planning & SFA implementation”

Born out of the brain of two technology lovers, Gray Routes Technology roots lie in utilizing the latest technologies to solve the age-old problem of location for enterprises. Since their inception, the company has worked hard to ensure that their solutions solve critical problems for the largest pioneering industry majors.

Carving a niche for self in the highly competitive business domain, Gray Routes Technology Pvt. Ltd is a leading provider of location analytics and field automation software that is growing fast with over quarter of revenues coming from international customers and rest from reputed enterprises in India, due to the solid value proposition they offer.

This is how the Gray Routes founding stone was laid
Around 6 years ago, on a hot humid afternoon in a dense shopping market within the polluted capital city of Guwahati, Odisha-born IIT KGP and IIM A alumni, Soubhagya Sahoo, training as an ASM and appraising the work of one of his cheeky sales reps, suddenly felt like a total idiot for not having devised a more intelligent way of remembering the locations of the stores visited that day. Doing so, would allow Soubhagya to visit those stores exactly after a week to check on the actual sales performance, adjusted for sales returns, underneath the rep’s hollow promises.

He got surprised noticing that a large pioneering MNC wasn’t utilizing the power of GPS, which was increasingly becoming available on smartphones then. This led him to 3 years of acute observation within the vast organization that is HUL, of how practical implementation challenges like high device, infra, support costs and training logistics limited modern technology from improving lives of all employees from director to the semi-literate last mile worker level.

Sapna, an ex-Googler who had been handpicked by a IIT-B startup to lead the ed-tech startup’s strategy and BD efforts after spending years learning well-researched techniques to teach the underprivileged community at Teach For India, joined hands in devising what was to become a hugely disruptive way of looking at GPS technology for enterprises. Both realized that use of GPS technology and the derived location intelligence could fundamentally overhaul not only how FMCG firms distributed goods, but also imact pharma, logistics, manufacturing and retail, mail & express, banking, construction sectors, not only in India but also internationally, as the world was looking at India for last mile best practices.

This led to the fantastic duo to start Gray Routes with their first product, GrayDrop that won the ET Power of Ideas award the same year, and angel funding within 3 months of incorporating the venture.

The company was recently conferred with the Fastest Growing Indian Company excellence award jointly by Indian Economic Development & Research Association (IEDRA) and International Achievers Conference in June 2016.

Array of services offered
Gray Routes currently provides mapping data analytics and field automation software for the FMCG and retail industry through GrayFOS, GrayDrop, GoStocky SaaS-based offerings. The location analytics (comprising of over 3 million proprietary points of interest, 60 million kms of geospatial data and over 25-30 million digitized public data points) is used to automate complex planning, scheduling and supervisory tasks involved with managing large teams of field workers, using a set of map-based mobile applications for field users such as sellers, drivers, MRs, and other door to door staff.

Serving a vigorous client base
A recipient of honor and pride from clients worldwide, the company has received highest approval ratings from a range of customers, starting from firms with 10 Crore revenues to 7000 Crores revenues and above, stating that the solutions offered by them are the best possible option in the market today to identify and improve non-desk worker productivity.

Gray Routes takes pride in having an esteemed client base; few of their prestigious clients are GlaxoSmithKline CH, Proctor & Gamble, RR Oomerbhoy, KG Functional Beverages (makers of Restless and Yoga Pulp drinks) and marquee clients in the Middle East. The Gray Routes sweet spot is large FMCG, manufacturing, pharma and Retail enterprises clients with multi-tier ERP structures and extended field sales teams who work closely with stockists and retailers. As a result, distributors and local logistics or implementation partners who serve end consumers also become a secondary channel. For the days ahead in business, the company sees construction and transport also as a target area, besides the fragmented logistics, mail and banking sectors and the steadily upgrading public sector.

This is what their satisfied client has to say about them
“GrayFOS is the best solution in the market today to figure out and drive productivity of field sales team. We are satisfied with the prompt implementation support provided by Gray Routes team.” – Krishnakant Dhurgude, Manager at R R Oomerbhoy Pvt Ltd.

Carrying a vision of expansion for future
For a blooming future ahead in business, the company focuses on building capabilities or acquiring teams that serve to provide an unmatched location analytics experience to their customers. Additionally, they are also scaling up their data analytics infra with sophisticated tools and technology to make the customer experience even richer.

As of now, the proficient team at Gray Routes is concentrating on Content marketing for which they need to hire, train and deploy an effective marketing team over coming few quarters for the same.

Geographies!!
Gray Routes is currently live with their solutions in 5 countries spanning UK, Middle East, India and South East Asia. In India they make their presence felt in 15 states and by the end of next quarter would be present in almost all major states in India. The company adheres to domestic expansion more, as they truly feel that the economy is vibrant, and demand for field automation is peaking.

Internationally, they have converted most online leads and won few accounts over Salesforce due to their native geospatial app and analytics edge. There is a lot of scope and hope riding on SEM efforts, wherein they are hoping to convert a greater proportion of frequent international visitors into paying clients.

“There is an adage that Sales is all about location, location, location and businesses today have three missing data points – location, location, location.”

Knowing the people behind Gray Routes success

Soubhagya Sahoo, CEO and Co-Founder– A passionate developer and an innovator, Soubhagya won his first GOLD medal at 18 yrs, in International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO 2001) and never looked back since then. Soubhagya topped IIT KGP to join NVIDIA, where he designed Display chips for Tesla/Tegra GPUs, leading international teams in USA, Taiwan on world-class hardware design and verification efforts.

He became the deserving one amongst top 2 in IIM A entering batch (2008) – finalist in Aditya Birla/OP Jindal scholarships also led Unify-ERP and Shakti Mobility projects as National Project Manager for Unilever India. As the anchor of the ship, he leads overall company vision, technology, product strategy, finance, consulting and marketing for Gray Routes.

Sapna Patel, Co-Founder– Meet Sapna, a Resourceful start-up leader with multi-industry experience across education, online sales & marketing, non-profit sector, retail and finance.

Started her career in Sales services with Google, she also advised global organizations such as Teach for India, Teach First UK on their Digital Strategy and Fellowship Programs. As VP, Strategic Alliances for IIT Powai-based EdTech startup Inopen Technologies, she allied with top Google Execs to host India’s first Google App For Education Conference and was instrumental in InOpen raising Strategic investment from Japanese major Benesse Corp.

This beauty with brains, today leads the services strategy, and operations including legal, business development, alliances and human resources for Gray Routes.

“We make use of high memory cloud computing instances, and also leverage latest functional and elegant visualization techniques for representing customer data in an insightful manner.”