Fahim Salam and Christopher Li were working on a digital logistics company with an ambition to disrupt the e-commerce logistics space in Bangladesh. The idea was a result of their own earlier hurdles with logistics while building an e-commerce company. While working on the logistics, the duo realized that there was an even bigger challenge: supply chain automation for enterprise and e-commerce companies in Bangladesh.

Why not? E-commerce is said to be an $8-billion dollar market in Bangladesh. Unlike many other markets, it is a unique market in which small Facebook and social media-based players dominate the bulk of the business. Most of these players run their operations manually and consequently, face a significant bottleneck in managing and scaling their businesses. Heavy reliance on staff to run the operations makes everything ineﬃcient and expensive.

E-commerce companies generally rely on a multitude of channels, including their website, social media pages, third-party e-commerce marketplaces, and IP phone calls, to receive orders. Since these companies run their operations manually, it takes herculean eﬀorts to manage orders coming through all these disparate channels.

While orders are collected through the websites and Social media pages, on the backend it is often an Excel sheet and humans purging data and setting things straight.

Over-reliance on manual processes makes growth costly, slows down operations, hampers customer services, and makes scaling almost impossible.

Order management is only one aspect of their operations. A multitude of other small and big aspects are involved including logistics, warehousing, ﬁnding the right suppliers, and the list keeps going.

For instance, information rarely flows freely from one department to another. It often needs to be relayed manually from one person to another, which slows everything down, impedes automation, and turns phone calls into the only medium to connect various parties.

Many large e-commerce companies have managed to automate some aspects of their operation but not entirely. These companies have systems, but those systems are rarely integrated. Then it becomes the same problem as two people who are not connected. They have warehouse management software that only warehouse guys know. The guys in logistics have their separate software. Nothing connects with anything.

The next challenge is even more pressing. Business is all about making good decisions, fast. Management needs to make quick decisions based on real-time data. But as you grow, access to information can become a challenge if you don’t have a system in place. That’s usually what happens with these companies. The lack of an automated data management system makes insight inaccessible. Many companies go around hiring analysts who do some pivot tables inside Excel sheets and come up with reports for diﬀerent departments, which usually is too late. You need to know what products are working and what are not as fast as possible so you can make changes. However, these things can be automated and made real time. And real-time access to intelligence can transform any business. It can improve operational eﬃciency and ensure superior coordination.

Enter Nuport: An Unfolding Opportunity

This is the context where Nuport, a Dhaka-based ambitious full-stack supply chain automation company, comes into the story. Founded in 2021 by Fahim Salam and Christopher Li, the company builds tools and applications for e-commerce and distribution companies to automate their entire supply chain and back office so that these companies can scale and grow faster and more eﬃciently.