Indian courier companies are often denounced for not matching up to the global standards. And one area in which they lag behind is the inadequate deployment of technology. Door to door courier (DTDC), one of India’s leading courier companies, chose to be an exception. Already a renowned name in the courier industry, with over 600 branch offices and 5,800 franchisees, the company boasts of leveraging the power of technology at every stage to achieve efficiency and greater ROI.
Despite being an early adopter of IT, the company continued to face technology related challenges which was affecting its growth and profitability. The key concern was the real time tracking of MPLS network between branch offices and two datacenters including DR site. “Real time data could not be effectively tracked and monitored by leased lines or MPLS. We relied on broadband Internet and used Propalms OneGate to access our business applications. But that was not enough. There was no custom application catering specifically to DTDC and these activities were done manually,” says Satyajit Sarkar, GM-IT, DTDC.
According to him, every branch office of DTDC had a local server setup, which caused synchronization problems. “When critical data was handled and managed manually during synchronization, it is bound to affect productivity,” says Sarkar.Besides, the company had to maintain a dispersed team of 140 people just to consolidate data from branch servers to centralized servers. This meant that, while couriers were getting delivered within days, data consolidation and data correction would take weeks,” he says. The company delivers over 11 million consignments per month. Besides, there was no user login auditing and control, which meant that there was no track on who did what with critical system data. This resulted in a lack of data security on end user machines.
The company selected Propalms solutions’ OneGate solution to consolidate data from branch servers to centralized servers and ensure an effective server based computing infrastructure. The criteria used for selecting the technology were reliability, security and ease of maintenance. Sarkar also had to ensure that the system is compatible with the existing applications.
As technology partner, Propalms created a system whereby DTDC users at Branch offices would first login into Propalms OneGate to verify their identity. The same identity was fed to the application by Propalms OneGate after making sure that user cannot change the login name in the application. The complete data encryption over MPLS ensures client data information integrity.
“The new solution has been running with thousands of user logins every day, feeding data in real time in our applications so that our customers can track their courier status every second, making it easier to provide real time access of courier data to our regional offices and agents at minimal cost, which was the key idea of the implementation,” informs Sarkar.
The new solution also offered the additional benefits of delivering hosted applications running in datacenter over Microsoft terminal services to DTDC using Linux, Windows, Android or iOS based devices. Sarkar believes that the deployment also addressed the load balancing problem at the terminal server farm and proved to be extremely secure fast and stable.
At present, DTDC is looking to migrate all the desktops from Windows to Linux with the support of its new infrastructure. Sarkar believes this effort would help the company drastically reduce desktop management cost in the coming months.
