Elbee To Go Express With SFA

Elbee Express services, a Mumbai based Express Courier company has operations in about eleven thousand six hundred locations in India with one hundred forty five offices. The company has tied up with various partners internationally to cater the foreign customers.

With the increasing scale of business, Elbee has deployed IT applications to cater to the demand. The implementation of e-TABS in 2006 was to track the consignment during transit through the consignment number. The same service was subsequently made available through SMS.

The Underlining Difference of SFA

Following on the same lines of improving customer service through IT, Elbee has signed up with Airtel Enterprise Services to roll out SFA (Sales Force Automation Application) for Pick-up and Delivery Processes. The SFA will be implemented in about a month and a half. It is under the POC stage. “The SFA application will enhance delivery information by four to five hours,” said Shirish Gariba, VP, IT and e-Commerce. Going by the present practice, the consignment delivery information is available to the customer only after the delivery employee files the information by the end of the day”.

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“Why should we let the customer wait for that extra four to five hours”, stresses Gariba. The companies delivering consignments to their customers demands payment on the basis of the time interval between getting the order and the date of delivery. The SFA will help our commercial customers in this regard.

“Elbee wants to create a niche for the distribution of securitised products like Debit Cards, Credit Cards, Bank Cheque books etc. Since SFA will float real time information about consignment delivery, it will help us focus on the same."

So How Does SFA Work?

Giving a hypothesis on how SFA will change the way a delivery employee works, Gariba says, “There is a PDA type application with a sign-on function. The employee needs to enter his name and password to upload the Delivery Channel list via the server, which will approximately take seven to eight minutes. As soon as the first consignment is delivered, the relevant customer information is entered in the device and is uploaded on the central server through GPRS just minutes after the delivery. If the customer checks about the status of the delivery any time after that, he will get real time information."

After completing all the deliveries for the day, the employee needs to submit the device to the company. The employees cannot use each others devices. However there are still some points about the functionalities that will be finalised in the POC stage.

Indian And Foreign Express Courier Companies-The Functional Difference

Since Elbee works jointly with other companies for its international operations, giving a comparative picture on the difference in the way express courier companies adopt technology in Indian and foreign countries, Gariba says that the courier companies especially in US have already invested huge sums of money on IT and have set a platform to integrate new applications easily.

One typical difference regarding delivering consignments is unlike in India, the courier companies in the US appoint the truck driver for deliveries. They are equipped with DIAD (Delivery Information Acquisition Device), the device, which takes the digital sign of the customer and can even be used to accept new pick-ups and deliveries during the day through text messages. There are also differences of rules for how much data should be stored. According to Indian rules it is compulsory for Indian companies to store data for the past eleven to twelve years.