DTDC Automates Consignment Tracking With OmniDocs

Courier companies today are constantly undertaking new initiatives to improve their service efficiencies and also to ensure secure delivery of high value consumer shipments. Recently, Indian courier and cargo company, DTDC, deployed a documents management system (DMS) in order to provide online Proof of Delivery (PoD) receipts and status of couriered items to its customers.

DTDC Courier and Cargo Limited has operations spread across several foreign countries through its service network. The company is headquartered in Bangalore and has regional offices in 10 cities across India. It has 4,400 branches across India and is operational 24/7.

DTDC’s IT infrastructure has enabled it to maintain a strong foothold in the competitive courier industry. The company has deployed a DMS from Newgen to ease out the process of sheeling out PoD receipts. The head office now has information about each and every high value shipment the company handles.

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Time Consuming Tracking Process

As per its system, DTDC delivers a copy of the PoD receipt to its customers and files a copy of the same at its HO in Bangalore. Logistically, it is difficult to get all the PoD receipts at the HO in time. Sometimes, customers also get the PoD after a delay.

Mrinal Chakraborty, GM-IT and Operational Processes, DTDC Courier and Cargo, says, “Out of 2.8 lakh shipments, almost 20 percent are high value consignments where our commitment levels also have to be very high. Around 70,000 PoDs have to be scanned and delivered to the HO and customers. In order to make this whole process smoother, we decided to go in for a document management system, which would not only automate the whole process but also make it more transparent”.

In order to enhance the satisfaction level of its customers, DTDC decided to integrate the DMS with its portal to facilitate online delivery status viewing. The online system has also reduced the workload of employees, freeing their time for more productive purposes.

As a courier company, DTDC has to archive lots of paper documents, which again requires a lot of space. The company soon realised that digitalisation could be a good solution to its archiving problem. It concluded that the DMS could help to achieve this while improving operational efficiency in the long run.

OmniDocs comes to the rescue

DTDC evaluated document management solutions from vendors like Xerox and Cofax along with Newgen. However, the company decided to go ahead with Newgen as it already had experience in the same domain. The DMS, scheduled to go live in January 2008, faced some software issues, and finally went live in June this year. The implementation process was completed within eight months with help from the Newgen team.

Chakraborty explains, “As Newgen had deployed the solution at Gati and its price point was suitable for us, we decided to deploy OmniDocs from Newgen. The product was purchased on licence basis and we will buy more licences in the coming days if we need them. The cost of the software was around Rs 18 lakh. We were planning to go live early this year but there were some issues with the server configuration and database. After solving all those problems, we managed to go live in June.”

Enhancing Customer Satisfaction Level

OmniDocs will serve as an integrated end-to-end solution for scanning of documents in a distributed environment and archiving of the same to the central DMS server. The solution has also been connected to the DTDC portal, so customers can now view the PoD receipt pertaining to their consignment. Apart from this, the company has started archiving various letters related to its employees and franchisee and branch offices. The system is running at 11 locations presently and DTDC is planning to expand this system to 20 other locations within one year. The company has recently made some technological enhancements in its data centre located in Bangalore and is quite aggressive on the IT front.

“With this implementation, we are the first courier organisation in India to provide online PoD receipts for our customers and to allow them to track their consignments online too. We have noticed immense enhancement in customer satisfaction levels post this deployment. It is now possible for us to keep track of the information related to our franchisees too. We have managed to digitalise the archiving process. Overall, the whole process of tracking consignments and maintaining records is now automated and smooth”, concludes Chakraborty.