The year 2020 was a roller coaster ride for businesses in almost every sector. The global lock-down caused due to the pandemic has highlighted the need for innovation for businesses to stay relevant in the market.
Changes call for innovation, and innovation leads to progress.
Logistics was one of the most pandemic affected sectors as the manufacturing of goods has paused. The virus gave us us a new way of living in which precautions like maintaining a physical distance is involved. The show must go on and so following all the norms of unlocking, businesses have started their operations on full scale. TagBox Solutions, a leading innovative tech company, provided a digital solution for enterprises to #Unlock and minimize operations down-time by ensuring Health & Safety of employees, partners and even customers in the supply chain.
This solution for real-time social distancing and contact tracing in workplace was the culmination of over 4 years of innovation and on-field experience that TagBox Solutions had demonstrated to help organizations create smarter and more reliable sites and supply chains.
TagBox’s BoxLens platform provides seamless integration of hardware, software, analytics, and actions to deliver end-to-end visibility into critical site and supply chain parameters.
In a conversation with Mr. Adarsh Kumar, Co-founder, and CEO at TagBox Solutions, he shared the journey of TagBox Solutions and how the company is empowering businesses.
Brief us about TagBox Solutions:
TagBox is helping organizations solve site operations and supply chain problems like Product Quality and Compliance, End to End Traceability, and Operational Efficiency. TagBox Solutions has customers spread across F&B, Pharmaceuticals, Hi-tech/industrial, Logistics, and Discreet Manufacturing segments.
TagBox Solutions’ BoxLens platform is being used by these organizations to improve the visibility of their Products, Staff, Assets, Processes, and the Environment in which all of these are operating in unison. Some examples of benefits that TagBox Solutions delivers to organizations:
- Improvement in temperature compliance for cold chains
- Reduction in spoilage of perishables and fragile goods damage
- Enable food/pharma safety via end-to-end traceability
- Reduction in site and logistics delays
- Improvement in asset inventory management and utilization
- Increase in staff safety and productivity
- Higher visibility of supply chain assets like pallets, bins, and boxes
You have to dream before your dreams can come true.
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam
- What were the initial challenges you faced?
TagBox Solutions’ product integrates the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Initial challenges were around:
- Identifying use cases that will have high enough ROI to justify the total cost of the solution
- Articulating the benefits that this integrated solution would bring to our clients.
- Working capital availability, given a hardware CAPEX heavy business
- Creating a team across hardware, software, analytics, and operations skillset
- Which was that point that triggered the growth of the company?
Our first trigger point came in 2018 when we were able to convince a couple of our initial customers for large-scale POCs which then converted to deals. This became a great proof point for our technology and value proposition. References from these customers helped us grow faster.
The second trigger point was Series A investment from TVS Motors. The TVSM brand helped us gain visibility and enhanced trust from prospects.
- How have the company graphs changed since the foundation? Can you share a few statistics?
We have grown steadily for the last 3 years. In 2020, despite Covid’s impact, our revenue has grown ~3X. This sends a signal that Indian organizations want to get digitized to achieve higher quality, traceability, and operational efficiency. We are excited about this opportunity and confident that we have more than 4 years of on-field digitization experience with over 35 customers backing us up.
- What is the reason behind your company’s long-standing success?
There is no single reason. It is a culmination of various factors:
- Company culture of customer centricity
- Extremely agile product development
- ‘Get things done’ mindset
- Founding team with cumulative 60+ years of corporate and start-up experience across IoT, ML, AI, business development, and operations.
- What are the products/services the company focuses on? How are your services different from those in the market?
TagBox’s BoxLens platform is a one-stop-shop solution that provides:
- IoT based Real-time Sensing to monitor the presence, proximity, temperature, humidity, shock, light, energy, and location
- Out-of-the-box integration with clients’ ERP
- ML-driven proprietary Early Warning Signal models for product or asset health risk prediction
- AI-driven Actions to help resolve real-time or systemic supply chain & operations problems
Unlike other IoT providers, we provide an integrated solution that includes hardware, software, analytics, and AI, which makes it a very seamless experience for our customers. TagBox Solutions provides a completely wireless hardware setup and a fully configurable software platform. We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach, we contextualize and customize the solution to meet the client’s requirements. We focus on insights and recommendations, rather than just looking at data gathering.
- How do you decide to take the company a step further in terms of your products/services?
Our customer success team is constantly listening to clients and bringing back real problems from the field for which our solutions could be relevant. This is used as input for our product roadmaps every year.
- According to you, how has the COVID-19 changed the ways of business processes, and how one should adopt these changes?
During Covid-19, businesses that had already adopted digital as their way of life were the most successful. We believe Covid-19 will further accelerate this trend and many new organizations are going to jump on the digital bandwagon.
Unmatched Leadership
- Adarsh Kumar, Co-Founder and CEO
Adarsh is a global analytics leader, with over 15 years of experience in providing Advanced Analytics solutions in the areas of Supply Chain and Banking to Fortune 500 companies. Before starting TagBox Solutions, he was a part of the senior leadership team at Mu Sigma, managing a multi-million dollar portfolio for analytics service delivery. A MICA alumnus, Adarsh is passionate about the usage of Machine Learning and AI for solving real-life business problems.
- Saumitra Singh, Co-Founder and CPO
Saumitra is Hardware Product Design Leader, with over 15 years of experience in designing solutions from semiconductor ICs to IoT systems. Before TagBox Solutions, Saumitra was VP of Engineering at Innorel and Power Management Design expert at Cosmic Circuits, some of the most pioneering Indian startups in the hardware space. He has 9 US patents and is a graduate from IIT Bombay.
- Sameer Singh, VP, Engineering
Sameer is a Product Engineering Leader, with over 11 years of experience in LTE/WiFi Front Ends and communication protocols. Before TagBox Solutions, Sameer worked in Lead Engineer roles with MNCs like Texas Instruments and Cadence. He has authored 2 IEEE papers and is a graduate of IIT Madras.
Every pain gives a lesson and every lesson changes a person.
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam
The key achievements
- Very early market validation and seed funding
- Building a tough business that combines hardware, software, and analytics into a single product
- Series A investment from TVS Group
- Various awards over the past 4 years. Ex. Nasscom Emerge50 2019, CII Startupreneur 2020, Elevate 100 Karnataka 2018
- Won the prestigious Qualcomm Design in India Challenge in 2017
- After rigorous due diligence, selected in various startup accelerators like SAP Startup Studio, NUMA, and Flipkart Leap
