DHL Facilitates Trade Between Organisations With IT

DHL Express India is amongst the leading players in the Indian Logistics Industry. IT being the spine of the logistics business, it plays a critical role in customer service enhancement. Last year, the company undertook IT initiatives such as initiating work on building a DR site in Chennai. As a back-up strategy, the IT team is building a contingency mechanism for the international network. Another initiative taken by DHL was providing consolidated reports to customers on the number of shipments delivered. In an interview with Biztech2.0 Prasad Dhumal, National IS Manager, DHL Express India, shares at length about the IT initiatives at DHL Express India.

How has your role, as the National IS Manager of DHL Express India changed over the years?

DHL is a service organisation that acts as a trade facilitator between different business organisations. So, instead of calling our technology department, an IT Department, we call it an Information Services Department, thereby adding to the technical functions of IT. Hence, the role of IT is to internally turn information into business, so that business can in turn facilitate trade between two organisations.

Managing the IT budget is also an important deliverable, along with rolling out solutions. Coupled with this, contribution to the senior management not only from an IT perspective but as well as a general business point of view holds equal importance. Therefore, I have to contribute from a sales, operations angle as well.

Which are the recent IT initiatives rolled out at DHL?

There have been a couple of initiatives, keeping in mind, both the internal and external customers. We have created a DR site for our call centre in Mumbai, which is located at Chennai. There is also a fall back design in place that enables us to take the call traffic load even during floods or heavy downpour (similar to the Mumbai floods on 26th July 2005), or when people are unable to report to the office. The agreement is made with the service provider on the course of action, during a disaster. If due to some reason they are not able to transfer calls, there are systems in place and the employees are capable enough to route the calls to the Chennai call centre. The customer would not even realise that the calls are being received from the Chennai centre.

Secondly, for the external customers, the DHL website has been enhanced with a feature that enables
them to get consolidated reports of the shipments. Earlier, the website had a Track-n-Trace feature that gave the status of the location of a single shipment. Either way, the customer can call the customer service for the shipment status. After the introduction of the new feature, the customer can now get a consolidated report on a weekly, quarterly and monthly basis, on all dispatches for the respective period. Thus, the customer does not have to go through invoices anymore and it also reduces the number of track-n-trace calls going to the customer service agents.

This was an in-house development, done jointly by the IT Department and the Customer Services Department. The technical aspects like extraction of data from the systems, generation and delivering the reports to the customers, was done by the IT team and the conceptual and designing was done by the Customer service.

Another initiative was implementing a contingency mechanism for our international network. We had two IPLCs (International Private Leased Circuit) at Mumbai, but after the deluge in 2005 one of the IPLCs was shifted to Chennai, providing complete redundancy for the international link as well. This is important since ninety percent of our applications are centralised at DHL’s APAC Datacentre in Malaysia. So, apart from having a DR site, it is also important to have a Dual-Homing for our international network. As a result, in case of any contingency situation in Mumbai, the data gets routed through Chennai. Importantly, we selected Chennai for the DR site because it falls into a less severe seismological zone and it also makes sense keeping the cost factor in mind.

What were the challenges in rolling out the Dual-Homing facility?

We have an MPLS network and the challenge was to dynamically route the data from the secondary link, in the event of the primary link going down. So, technically, there are different sites, where unlike the traditional static network with a defined path, the MPLS network needs to have intelligence to divert the link, measure the real time capacity and accordingly prioritise the network traffic.

Please share with us, what the testing phase was like

It was only during the third attempt that our efforts proved fruitful. We had listed down six probable scenarios or contingency situations, and wanted to assure that all of them are taken care of automatically without manual intervention. In the first attempt, we were successful in three out of six scenarios, followed by five out of six and finally in the third attempt, after rectifying the mistakes the team was successful in cracking all the scenarios.

You have been with DHL for over a decade now. How has your experience helped in overcoming challenges like testing the facilities?

The CIO has a complete picture of the typical scenarios. Since I have served in various capacities at DHL, in case of a contingency, the problem can be tackled after working on the probabilities. The IT team and myself are completely aware of our critical sites and the nature of the shipment movement at those sites. For instance, if the Chennai gateway is supposed to do something urgent, we know about the critical time frames, the load volumes and the kind of support they would need. In a typical pick-up scenario, we know that the courier field staff would have gone to the customer site for the pick-up and posted the data back to the customer service.

Another scenario that can be typical of a customer registration scenario is one where the customer calls the customer service and subsequently the data is converted into the application, which is then forwarded to the scanner of the courier field staff. In the above scenarios, the CIO is aware of the chain of activities and is therefore able to tackle the problem. The experience also helps devise a way to make good the loss for the delay in the delivery of the dispatch.

Are there any in-house applications developed at DHL?

In fact most of our applications have some aspect developed in-house. However, the Track-n-Trace application was developed by the team twenty-five years ago and surprisingly till date, there is no off the shelf application available. We have developed certain CRM modules, billing solutions, ground operations movement applications in-house. Significantly for ERP, we have recently implemented financial and HR modules, however they are not from the same ERP. We are using SAP for financial solutions and Peoplesoft for HR, since they fulfill company specific requirements.

Some other in-house applications are customer service, operations, and sales force automation. For
WAN, although there are some applications available, there is nothing specific for the logistics industry. This is because the industry is very fragmented with complex operations.

What part of the IT is outsourced?

All the non-core DHL IT operations like WAN management, desktop support, and facilities management like printers, LAN have been outsourced. Also the hardware and telecom support are outsourced to vendors on the basis of their expertise.