Citrix XenApp plays key role in Safexpress Digital Transformation
Safexpress is a market and thought leader in supply chain and logistics industry in India. The company aims to provide value to businesses at every level—providing world-class warehousing support and on-time delivery of goods. Safexpress delivers to remote corners in the country leveraging a network of hubs and distribution centres.
Over the last 18 months, the company embarked on digital transformation to increase workforce and process efficiency, enhance transparency and customer satisfaction. But application performance and poor network connectivity at remote locations hampered data capture while receiving consignment, stymieing digital roll out.
Safexpress
www.safexpress.com
01. Customer Need
Safexpress has the most expansive distribution network in India and largest delivery presence in North east. Covering all pincodes, Safexpress delivers at some of the remotest locations, including Leh.
Speed is of essence in the logistics industry and meeting and exceeding SLAs is a competitive edge—not surprising considering logistics is the backbone for many industries such as ecommerce, retail, manufacturing and FMCG. Therefore Safexpress has a fanatical focus on meeting SLAs.
However to achieve consistent performance and exceed customer expectation, digitization and automation is a business imperative. ERP plays a key role in going digital as capturing consignment details at the point of request is critical to the digital process. Except in rare cases, no manual entry is allowed as a best practice to prevent malpractice and negligence.
Application must always be available and functioning optimally to enable business achieve time goals. The criticality of application performance is such that if application goes down or is not functioning properly, consignment cannot move—resulting in loss of precious time. This impedes meeting SLA requirements and adversely impacting customer satisfaction.
Safexpress wanted a solution that addresses all operational challenges and helps meet business goals. The company uses Citrix to improve application performance and overcome connectivity issues by boosting network performance at remote locations.
To achieve higher productivity, process efficiency and customer satisfaction, Safexpress required an upgrade to XenApp 7.15 advanced edition. Umbrella also helped with upgradation to Netscaler for network and application load balancing from existing hardware thus facilitating attainment of high performance levels.
02. Solution
Umbrella deployed XenApp 7.15 with Citrix best practices in short span of time. This helps employees get predictable access to application and conduct operations smoothly, quickly.
Citrix NetScaler Access Gateway was configured to enable users to securely access application from 1500 locations across the country, including very remote locations. NetScaler also helps Safexpress to meet Disaster Recovery objectives between its data centres.
03. Results
With Citrix XenApp 7.15, Safexpress application is always available at all pick up locations. Irrespective of the sector and quality of connectivity, Netscaler optimizes application performance making it easily available to process service requests—critical to initiate business transaction.
Operations team is now able to quickly move consignment which helps meet SLA. Technology is not just an enabler but a participant in increasing customer satisfaction. The application is linked to IoT and consignment is tracked throughout transit by scanning the consignment barcode with digital scanners and providing updates to customer in a transparent manner.
Connecting the application with IoT has also resulted in increasing process efficiency as misplaced goods in warehouses can be easily traced and moved forward. Operations employee productivity has seen a phenomenal 30% increase with fast application access and task completion.
Says Kapil Mahajan, CIO Safexpress, “Logistic is highly dependent on technology for on-time delivery and operational insights—a competitive advantage. We need robust infrastructure to run core ERP and critical systems which in turn is critical to move and track consignments, achieve efficiency and meet SLAs. We have experienced more than 20% reduction in connectivity related issues with the efficiencies brought in by upgrading to Citrix XenApp and NetScaler along with better user experience for the operations team”.
