Supply-chain data analytics provider GrandCanals has had a big week, launching a new version of its specialized cloud and closing a $4.8 million Series A financing round. The venture capital initiative was led by Cloud Apps Capital Partners and AllMobile Fund.
The new funding, announced May 16, is aimed at fueling the company’s growth via marketing and sales as it promotes adoption of the latest version of its Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud to retailers and e-commerce companies.
Los Gatos, Calif.-based GrandCanals claims that Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0 enables companies to run a supply chain with confidence and provides the business intelligence required to improve fulfillment chains and meet customer expectations on delivery time, cost, and convenience.
Amazon.com and the rise of other ecommerce businesses have changed the environment for business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B) and third-party logistics (3PL) organizations. E-commerce sales account for nearly 10 percent of total retail sales and are growing at almost 24 percent each year, according to industry analysts –far faster than traditional brick-and-mortar sales.
How Buyer Behaviors Are Changing
At the same time, buyer behaviors are rapidly changing. Millennials now outpace baby boomers in combined buying power for the first time in history; 70 percent of worldwide spending will be done by millennials by 2020, analysts predict.
Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud 3.0 is a SaaS application that enables analytics-driven fulfillment. The solution was purposely built for improving direct-to-customer fulfillment by a focused team of supply chain experts, data scientists and technologists with more than a century of combined experience in supply chains.
Key standard features of the Fulfillment Intelligence Cloud include:
- fulfillment analytics and modeling powered by data science;
- fulfillment and carrier data normalization technology with FD-Mapper; and
- ERP, TMS integration through open APIs to enable a closed-loop fulfillment process.
Among the new features in version 3.0 are:
- TurboRFP, for fast, data-driven RFP generation and automatic carrier proposal analysis;
- enhanced carrier and mode switch modeling to answer complex “what-if” scenarios; and
- updated user interface for superior ease-of-use.
For more information on GrandCanals, go here.