Describe your current job role and a summary of the business model of your organisation?
Innovation at Aramex involves building new products, processes, and programmes that transform how it does business today. In the Innovation division, the company continuously defines and develops how that will be done tomorrow, enabling its customers’ strategic roadmap for the future.
What are your strengths and abilities that you bring to the above role?
It is about having the mindset of continuous learning and constant improvement. That mindset is critical to transforming and enabling transformations. It has been a key driver towards Angad’s professional growth and personal development.
Please describe the expectations of the end customers that you address?
Today, customers have a strong capability-building and transformation mandate. This mandate is addressed towards scalability, profitability, and customer experience to create differentiation in a competitive market. Logistics and technology serve as true enablers and differentiators for the end customer.
Which generic technologies and innovations can influence your end customers business?
Technology through digitisation and unification of multiple products under one view and platform for a customer is going to be a differentiator going forward. We are seeing retail being transformed. The logistics world would need to transform to accommodate these new developments to provide the end customer with a great experience and enhanced convenience.
Think back to truly game-changing innovations in the world of logistics; It was probably the containerisation of products for shipping or motor vehicles. Going forward, the pace and scale of transformation of Aramex’s customers are much higher than at the moment when those innovations took place, and thus, the company is geared up to be at the forefront of the next game-changing innovation in this space.
How can a channel partner in your industry disrupt the regional market and gain a leading competitive position?
It is quite difficult to penetrate an established technology stack in a large company. Channel partners should look at solving critical problem statements in the market for customers or service players like Aramex. The effort to integrate and the costs involved are up for subjective interpretation today, leading to long timelines with no decisions. There is an opportunity for channel partners to look at creating a community-level engagement and collaboration that provides a transparent commercial model along with a low effort to integrate and scale up.
Which aspects of your job role do you find rewarding and which are challenging?
Disruption in the form of a positive enhancement of customer experience, or new revenue or enhanced productivity is what drives Angad and is what he would classify as a reward. Disruption is the output of a strong innovation engine, and thus, it is a great reward when it is realised.
The challenging part of the same innovation process is that the defining and development of new products that have no benchmark can be incredibly hard in terms of getting it right. There are a lot of failures in this process as well, which are the challenges.
How do you best like to de-stress and re-charge off work?
Over the past year, Angad has been blessed with two things: a beautiful daughter from his amazing wife and an affinity for workouts like HIIT and Boxing sessions. These two blessings help him de-stress. For re-charging, he loves to travel and call Scotland his second home.
