Indian-based logistics company uses cognitive cloud native digital logistics platform.
India’s Safexpress has deployed ‘PROPEL-i’, a bespoke, end-to-end cloud native logistics platform, to enable the company to attain agility in demand management.
Developed in collaboration with IBM Global Business Services, the digital platform will also help Safeexpress obtain advanced and flexible dynamic pricing modelling capabilities and provides enhanced visibility and transparency for its customers.
Safexpress has a network of 60 logistics parks, 42 3PL locations, 1959 booking offices, 7,500 containerised GPS enabled vehicles, operates on 1,830 routes, and delivers 100 million packages a year to over 5,000 corporations across 31083 pin codes in India.
It has been on digital transformation journey for the last few years and has a strong focus on technology driven business acceleration and growth. The logistics market in India is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 10.5 per cent between 2019 and 2025, according to the report, Indian Logistics Industry Outlook, 2020.
To capitalize on this significant market opportunity and fuel its growth plans, Safexpress wanted to remodel its core business processes and further expedite the adoption of next-generation technologies and digital-driven solutions. Safexpress then collaborated with IBM to design and build ‘PROPEL-i’, an innovative scalable logistics platform, deployed in a secure & resilient cloud environment, said Kapil Mahajan group CIO at Safexpress.
“Being a technology driven organization, our next wave of business strategy was focused on building a cognitive enterprise that can keep up with the speed of transformation around us,” he said. “‘PROPEL-i’, which is our new transportation management system (TMS) platform, has been built with Design Thinking at its core and centered around four key pillars; people, process, data, and technology.”
‘PROPEL-i’ is an internal logistics operations management suite of applications custom-built by IBM Global Business Services for Safexpress. It is designed specifically with a mobile first policy which enables the field staff to work from anywhere and frees the company to migrate to a desktop-free environment which maximizes office space.
The platform is based on microservices which is a cloud native architectural approach in which a single application is composed of many loosely coupled and independently deployable smaller components, or services. These components can be scaled and updated independently of one another, reducing the waste and cost associated with having to scale entire applications because a single feature might be facing too much load.
By leveraging the container management capabilities of Kubernetes deployed on a public cloud, the ‘PROPEL-i’ platform provides Safexpress with high scalability, availability and security with self-healing runtime environment. The platform’s API interface integrates with Safexpress’ customer system and enables streamlining of workflows & efficiencies in internal processes and provides industry leading integration capabilities. The project consists of multiple components such as customer contracts, associate contracts, booking, associate management and others.
Established in 1997, Safexpress offers a wide range of innovative supply chain services including express distribution, third-party logistics, and consulting to its customers.
Tags: ibmpropel-isafeexpress
