Re Engineering Logistics

8/3/2019 Re Engineering Logistics

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Reengineering LogisticsBY GRAPH ICS ON DECEMBER 3 , 2008 IN ART ICLES

TCS is the epitome of multi-tasking. This year, it consolidates the following: celebrates 25 years,

manages 5 million monthly shipments, 170 Service Centers, 2031 couriers on the road daily and

makes itself Pakistans most technology-intensive company!

In the early 1990s when people pronounced Psion as Puu-si-on, the IT department of TCS was

already well ahead of its time. In its 25th year of operations, TCS not only leads in the market, but

quite literally, owns it.

Part of a conglomerate, Tranzum Corporation which has operations as diverse from courier, logistics,

supply chain solutions, aviation and so much more, you know youre looking at a company that has a

critical dependence on a robust and intelligent infrastructure. If not, Tranzums TCS wouldnt be able

to have the service track record it has had. Starting with just 25 shipments a day back in 1983, TCS

Pakistan has continued to lead, the courier and logistics service industry in Pakistan through sheer

innovation. Today, an average 5 million shipments pass through our network each month. Add the

load of the additional 11 million shipments of bank statements which pass through every January

and July of the year, and you can see just how streamlined our operations have to be, starts off

Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan, Head of IT at TCS.

Jamil Ahmed, VP Operations and Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) adds, Its a bit archaic

when you expect your floor supervisor, the guy that is managing the action in the middle of the

location sorting to spend endless hours on the floor. Today is all about adding the checkpoints, using

the technology to facilitate him, add business intelligence and reduce the human error. The

company will automate as much as it can and with its BPR strategies in place, their current capacity

will also continue to grow.

It isnt easy being a service-oriented company. Customer demands continue to increase as do their

expectations and more often than not, youll find the best companies continue to raise the bar on

their own standards making sure the maximum level of satisfaction is continuously reached.

When you hear the head of BPR start a discussion with, We are standing at a point where we need to


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make smarter use of technology in order to enhance capacity and better the integration of our

internal processes and Were already looking into ERPs to figure out what will best meet our

rapidly growing needs, and We follow international best practices because we believe that TCS and

its related services are world class you know this is the company that doesnt just talk technology,

they actually walk it.

This is How They Do It

Zulfiqar Ahmad Khan brings years of army service experience with him to head the 35 man IT

department. I was pleasantly surprised to find the kind of discipline that was there in the IT

department when I joined. We realized very early on that it was time to use technology to automate

the companys operations towards a paperless environment so there would be greater efficiency and

productivity. So, here when I joined I set my target that to improve the technology to make it more

valuable and to bring it and its application closer to customers.

The 35-person IT Department at the heart of TCS is divided into software development,

infrastructure and hardware troubleshooting teams. Theyve got the two basic domains:

Infrastructure and Software. Infrastructure domain includes the help desk, hardware assembling and

troubleshooting, messaging, email system and all network communication across the LAN and WAN

as well as the MIS, BIS and portal functions.

The software division consists of all developers, programmers and system analysts. They are the

ones who take care of the core development, application development, customization in the existing

applications and all the new developments. When TCS was looking to buy solutions from the global

marketplace which would fulfill their requirements, they were unable to find one that fit the bill. So

they did what any aspiring company would do: hired the best people inhouse to build it themselves.

TCS developed its own Operations Management System inhouse based on its experience and know

how about the business. We knew the kind of user interface our team needed, and we knew what

bits of information needed to be used in what part of the application which would streamline our

operations in the most efficient manner. So we started off on an Oracle platform and just kept

building on it. In the process, the IT department would continue to learn about the operational and

business side of the massive organizations, and there was just no slowing down the growth rate.

TCS presently has more than 170 customer service centers located across the country and their

organizational hierarchy is divided by so: the head offices, followed by regional offices, area offices,

branch and then stations. There are 10 Area offices which are integrated with our central servers

through what we call Data Processing Centers. Everything about TCS courier services is based on

customer data so everything has to be updated as per the schedule and centrally maintained. The 170


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service centers means 170 distinct points that have to be able to plug themselves into the system not

only to update the central database thats running, but also be able to access essential customer

information.

Their interaction with our Operations Management System had to be controlled so that they were

able to find what they needed and we were able to maintain the privacy and control over the

customer data that they could access, explains Zafar.

We have to ensure that all the IT operations of this value chain and infrastructure environment are

streamlined thereby enabling our customers to take benefit of the information they required.

Customers need to know the real time status of the package that is being sent, which they are able to

do.

The Making of a Delivery

Nothing has been more fascinating than to be able to track the status of a package in real time. And

the fact that speaks volumes is the fact that more than just the customer knowing what the real time

status is, the TCS staff is just as attuned to the needs of the customer. Call and test a TCS support

member and theyll know what youre looking for and how best to find it for you. These guys are

among the best data miners because they know what their customer wants.

But how does the delivery process actually begin?

Lets say there are 3,000 shipments originating in Karachi. The engine that consolidates all the data

into meaningful information is the Operations Management System which sorts packages based on

geographical proximity and location and area. All the data that each individual service center enters

into the system is separate from main OMS. An inhouse application we built, the platform and

database of the application runs on

Oracle. So all the data received from service centers is merged into this OMS and the work done

during sorting and transportation is also added on into the system. A system which runs on IBM

Blade Servers and SANs (Storage Area Networks) to optimize the data collection.

The OMS then generates an automated delivery sheet which includes the details of parcel and its

destination. When delivery is taken by the courier, that delivery sheet guides him to the destination,

he gets it signed, brings it back and inputs the data into the system. The information is updated on

the application for any future reference or customer queries, says Zafar.

At any one time, TCS has 2031 couriers moving customer packages all over Pakistan. Keeping track

of all the deliveries, the real time locations of each of the couriers can easily turn into a logistical

nightmare if you dont have a redundant system in place. No interruptions, no downtime,


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contingencies and good people. The team across the entire operation is a tremendous asset to the

company. A lot of what we do is clockwork, a lot is managed by automated systems, but the rest has

to be run by our people.

Overcoming Challenges

One challenge that everyone in Pakistan has been faced with is that of a map, or the lack of one. And

since the majority of the country is not going to be found on a map (except for the isolated efforts of

companies such as Naqsha.net and others, previously featured in CIO Pakistan) the fact that a TCS

uniform can find his way to a destination anywhere, is a feat beyond what any technology can assess

for you.

You ask a courier for a specific area where any postal address there is and he will probably be able to

describe the gate or the front door. Thats how committed they are, says Jamil. And they are,

literally, walking Map Quests. If you dont have maps, you dont have digital coordinates, which

means you can only use technology on the road to a limited extent. There goes my vision of having

every inch of the company plugged into the cloud!

But perhaps sticking an RFID tag on every package isnt the most cost effective way to manage the

operation because it would increase the actual cost of doing business in the first place. We managed

to downsize the number of characters we need to send through confirmations which our courier boys

can then simply connect via GPRS and send back to the system. But this took some trial and error.

Our software can communicate with the mobile devices that some of our delivery teams carry. We

tried WiFi, but that turned out have its own set of challenges, so we reduced the size of the data that

needed to be communicated by the devices, and went with sending data over GPRS, which turned out

to be quite efficient. But not all cellular providers offer the kind of support that TCS was looking for.

You have to understand that we make deliveries into places which are often beyond the coverage

area, so the initial GPRS connections we were signed on with, would end up charging us for 1Mb of

data transfer each time one of us connected, didnt make the transaction and got disconnected. With

360 distinct routes around Karachi alone, this was turning out to be a very expensive proposition.

After the trial and error of testing a number of service providers out, TCS decided to go with

Mobilink.

Of course technology is ideal for purposes of tracking and communication, but there is very little

infrastructure that is ready to match our needs, smiles Jamil. Because there are so many interaction

points with any one single package, the fact that TCS has the vision to use the technology isnt

enough to make it happen. RFID and Supply Chain management is everything that needs to happen.

But us sticking a tag will be somewhat useless until the airports have the RFID readers in place and


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the entire tunnel through which every parcel and document travels, has the business intelligence

implemented to better manage the deliveries. Well, that makes sense. Once you book a parcel with

the courier company, they manage it for you. So it travels through multiple locations within this

tunnel before reaching its destination. Until the compete ecosystem isnt enabled, little is going to

happen. But these are things that come into the BPR and things that will eventually happen,

assures Jamil.

But its more than just the cloud or the connectivity. In order to be world class, you have to

consistently meet the quality standards. Jamils office sends out specific KPIs for every department

and how quickly the information has to be consolidated into the OMS. The efficiency with which the

OMS functions, is the baseline for how optimal our entire organization is, says Zafar. And this is an

ongoing effort how to increase capacity, increase efficiency and optimize existing resources.

Business Process Reengineering allows us to take a closer look at each of the operational units and

make sure they are working in their optimal capacities, as well as better align every process to be part

of the bigger picture, explains Jamil.

And what a big picture it is!

Because there are so many related services that Tranzum provides, a lot of the information system

processes can be replicated across each service. The learning that the IT Department had on

developing the OMS and matching the physical infrastructure to go with it, the company went ahead

to look similar tracking options for Visa processing and Warehousing. And like any smart service-

oriented company, Tranzum consolidated its highly reputable and available team for deploying its

other services across the country.

The team developed the Warehouse Management System on pretty much the same lines as the OMS.

But warehousing is different than the courier in that the packages are usually larger in size and stay

with us longer, so you need a way to manage the entire consignment. Companies lease space with

TCS warehouses and store their goods, which have specific IDs and tags assigned to them. The

WMS checks the code and identifies the category and nature of the product and assigns a vacant

place in the shelves and racks. Lets suppose a representative comes from a company and wants to

retrieve one of the consignments. We run the tags and IDs through the WMS to get the exact location

o f the goods in the warehouse. This is just an intelligent use of the allocation of space and retrieval of

the goods, says Zafar.

More Learning

Despite our inhouse capabilities, we are constantly investing in efforts to develop a better


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understanding of relevant systems available in the world. We are shopping around for the best ERP

to help integrate or migrate from our OMS, for which we are in discussion with several ERP and

System Integration companies. We are also consulting with firms and IT houses who are working on

GPRS and GPS-based systems. Route planning is quite advanced and sorting is also quite developed,

we are always on the lookout for equipment that will enable us to be better than we are. The

handheld devices need to be introduced but they are just too expensive. If we can work with

companies to reduce costs into our range, we are ready to make the shift over.

Jamil and Zafar are on a mission to automate existing capacities and increase accuracy at all levels.

We are working on our security applications; we are testing 6 Sigma in our operations and analyzing

its feasibility and efficiency to our processes and functions. Were not getting excited with the

potential we can achieve; we just want solutions which can make a deep impact on our over all

business. At the end of the day, if we cant give our customers the Wow experience every time they

interact with us, none of this investment is worth it. All this can only be happen when we take the

necessary proactive measure to minimize areas where mistakes can happen. Thats what our

approach to technology.

More than just the approach, its the vision. Meet with anyone at TCS and youll find consistent

vision, mission, passion and dedication. Creativity and innovation to benefit business. Thats the way

to do it.

Re Engineering Logistics

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