Our Founder and CEO Arne Jeroschewski was recently interviewed by Tech In Asia to share his journey on Parcel Perform, his day-to-day routine and envisioning how the e-commerce logistics industry will look like in 10 years. Read the transcript below or watch the interview

Hi, I'm Arne, the founder and CEO of Parcel Perform. Speech, five minutes.

[00:00:12]

Why did you start Parcel Perform?

In my previous life, I worked for a big logistics company.  In that role, I was talking to many e-commerce customers, and as much as we were able to deliver a great service to them, we couldn't solve all the problems because they were working with many logistics companies. They also had to deal with a lot of different integrations and customer experience. They had to manage. This created a lot of complexity for them. 

We created Parcel Perform as a solution that helps the merchants to really make this a lot better and easier for them. They can work with as many logistics companies as they like, while at the same time delivering a great experience for their own customer.

[00:00:46]

What does your day to day look like?

As a father of two, my day starts very early in the morning, waking up the kids, feeding them in the morning and bringing them to school. My workday usually is packed with lots of meetings, sometimes 15, 20 smaller meetings to connect with everyone, talk to customers. My day ends around 6:30 when I rush home and make sure that I can have dinner with my kids and bring them to bed.

After that, my European shift starts. We have a lot of business in Europe and we have a lot of customer calls or we connect with the team members over there. This sometimes goes until midnight. I will have to admit, by the end of the week, I'm really, really happy that the weekend starts.

[00:01:26]

What is it like operating on a global business out of Singapore?

With us starting in Singapore, we knew that we have to be successful beyond Singapore. Therefore, we build our product for it to be flexible. for it to accommodate all those local market requirements. We have customers in Latin America, North America, Africa, Europe, Australia. So it's a very, very broad product. And I think we attribute it to the fact that we started off in Singapore with the right mindset. One other thing of running an international company is, of course, that you operate across different time zones.

You have to accommodate calls sometimes very early in the morning, sometimes in the evening. We have our salespeople attending conferences between two to four a.m. in the morning, Singapore time. So I believe it's a lot of fun to work in this global setting, although it can be challenging at times.

[00:02:11]

What technology innovation excites you the most? 

50 years ago, every letter was delivered to your doorstep and handed over to you by the postman. At some stage, people realized, oh, this is rather inefficient.

That's when they introduced the post boxes downstairs and made the whole process a lot more efficient. With parcel delivery, we are very much at the same point. We have delivered parcels the same way for the last 30 years. So people think, OK, this is very inefficient that we drop off a parcel five times a day. That's where the concept of lockers came in; where you can drop off the parcels close to you and pick them up whenever it's convenient for you.

I believe this is one of the most important innovations in parcel delivery that we're going to look at in the future. Admittedly, I'm an e-commerce logistics nerd. It's very, very exciting to be part of this in Singapore being rolled out over the next year.

[00:03:00]

How will e-commerce logistics look like 10 years from now?

If you look at the whole delivery process, most of the time the parcel is actually sitting somewhere waiting. To really improve the transit times of a parcel from A to B, you don't necessarily need to let the trucks run faster. You have to eliminate the times the parcel is just sitting there waiting. And I think there's a lot of things we can do with data and other technologies like machine learning to make those processes a lot more efficient. Most deliveries should happen actually in the same day in just a few hours.

There are already some markets, where this has become reality. I think that's something we can look forward to, at least in the next 10 years, that anything you order would be with you very, very shortly.

[00:03:40] 

Any favourite moments since you joined Parcel Perform?

There’s two things that stood out to me. The one moment that was very memorable is when you first take this idea to build a product and then be able to sell this product to a big customer. And I think that that's a very, very good feeling.

And I remember that as one of the most important milestones for us to say, hey, we're onto something. The second one is every time we move offices, we move to a new office. And then you say, oh, this is now the fifth office on this journey. And you think back on all the previous offices where we were five people, then we were ten people. And every time you think, OK, how much has changed in the company?

Yeah, I think that's a very nice reflective moment and shows you that we have come a long way as a business. So I think I really treasure both of those moments and I think they have been a very important part of this journey that we're on.

These are six questions with me, Arne the founder and CEO of Parcel Perform. I hope I could excite you a little bit more about e-commerce logistics. Thanks for watching.

Parcel Perform is also hiring across our various offices in Singapore, Vietnam and Germany! Visit our careers page for more information Read here for more information on Parcel Perform. See yourself joining the team? Join us or contact us if you have any further enquiries!

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