IBM has announced that Safexpress, a supply chain & logistics company, has deployed ‘PROPEL-i’, a bespoke, end-to-end cloud native logistics platform, which was developed in collaboration with IBM Global Business Services.
The digital platform enables the company to attain agility in demand management, obtain advanced and flexible dynamic pricing modelling capabilities and provides enhanced visibility and transparency for its customers, according to a statement made by the company.
Established in 1997, Safexpress offers a wide range of supply chain services including express distribution, third-party logistics and consulting to its customers.
Safexpress with its network of 60 logistics parks, 42 3PL locations, 1959 booking offices, 7,500 containerized 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.
Commenting on the collaboration, Mr. Kapil Mahajan, Group CIO, Safexpress said, “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. ‘PROPEL-i’, which is our new transportation management system (TMS) platform, has been built with Design Thinking at its core and centered around 4 key pillars: People, Process, Data and Technology. Its microservices based cloud native architecture will further strengthen our position as a market leader both from logistics and technology standpoint and help us respond exceptionally faster to the market dynamics while minimizing time, cost and effort on new product development lifecycle.”
Kamal Singhani, Country Managing Partner – IBM Services, India/South Asia added, “‘PROPEL-i’ is a major milestone for Safexpress as well as India’s logistics sector and is a testament to the continued success of the company’s longstanding association with IBM. By leveraging our deep industry expertise and access to technological innovations including cloud & AI, Safexpress will be able to leverage the new digital platform to manage their growing business, enrich customer experiences as well as boost revenues by acquiring new accounts & by optimizing costs.”
‘‘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 statement added.
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.
Arya has been a part of the Content & Research Team at Hrnxt.com. She is a keen observer of economic developments, emerging businesses, people in business and keeps a tab on latest happenings in the business environment.