Harish Patel, a small time hard ware distributor who dots Mumbai’s
congested Lamington Road, the Mecca for resellers, has been incurring heavy loss
due to delay in consignments. Though he understands the need to track the status
of these consignments, which he sends every week to his resellers in various
small towns in Maharashtra and Gujarat, either online or on phone, the wayside
courier service does not offer him that luxury. And Patel cannot afford to turn
to global giants like Fedex and DHL which have extensively e-enabled their
business.
There is little doubt that Patel’s experience is repeated across the
country with a large number of people who just cannot shell out the money to
employ the big-ticket courier agencies. And it just seems impossible for the
small courier companies (numbering about 1,500 to 2,000 across the country) to
e-enable their business. Neither do they have the financial muscle or requisite
expertise to have an own internal IT team, nor can they implement expensive
third-party applications. The only way out appears to have a cheaper third-party
solution that will be affordable to the beleaguered small courier agencies and
therefore to all the harassed Patels. Thankfully, the Rs 250 crore PCS
Industries has brought some cheers to this sector–it has developed a new
solution that fits their requirements to a tee.
This is in the form of trackyourpack.com, an integrated software application
in the ASP mode designed to help monitor the movement of consignments in transit
with precision on a minute to minute basis and more importantly not burning too
much of a hole in the pocket. No wonder, AS Velpanur, V-P, SBU, PCS Industries,
the brain and the architect behind the trackyourpack application, is eager to
emphasize on the less expensive part. "Our solution with its affordable
pricing is targeted at the community of small couriers only. The Fedex and the
Blue Darts who already have more expensive applications are not our target
customers."
But why did PCS, primarily known as a hardware manufacturer, go for
developing an application addressing the courier industry? Velpanur provides the
answer: "PCS ships number of PCs throughout the year at various locations
across India. For this we were using the service of a number of courier and
cargo companies to move the shipments but we were unable to track the position
of these consignments on a real time basis." This incidentally triggered
off a search for a solution that could provide real time information. And
subsequently PCS developed a web-based solution to meet this internal
requirement. Therefore what started as an internal project was later devised to
become a solution catering to the small courier agencies.
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Apart from helping monitor movement of consignments in transit realtime,
trackyourpack also offers a host of other functionalities. It generates invoices
for the courier agency to bill to its customers as well as monitor the
performance of regions, branches, franchisees as well as the delivery staff. In
the words of Velpanur, "Trackyourpack redefines the operating process and
facilitate information classification, exchange and retrieval in a smooth manner
allowing couriers to provide value added services to its clients."
Shirish Gariba, Elbee Services, believes that any good application for the
courier industry should always have these attributes. Elbee itself has a similar
home-grown application, and this scenario is replicated across all the leading
courier companies. But he admits that there is indeed a serious lack of good
third-party application, and once it comes to the question of having a solution
affordable to the smaller courier agencies, the cupboard is particularly bare.
So in the ultimate analysis what are the benefits apart from the cost factor
that small courier agencies gets from trackyourpack. Says S Mehmood, V-P
(Operations & Promtions, Big Guy Courier Pvt. Ltd., one mid-tier courier
company which has already adopted the PCS solution, "The customers’
consignments can now be tracked online realtime and this has allowed us to
provide value-added services to our customers." Velpanur suggests that
these small operators require other benefits like easy data entry,
simplification of processs, single point administration, assured back end
support and adequate safety measures for their solutions. The bigger courier
companies with their in-house solutions take this for granted since they can
afford large internal development/support teams as well as expensive data center
back up. Trackyourpack offers all these benefits, so that in terms of e-enablement
of their business processes, the smaller guys have a level playing field with
the Fedexs and Blue Darts. While biggies are hesitant to commercialize their
solution for the lack of an appropriate technology partner. With trackyourpack
perfectly filling this gap, it seems that this PCS solution will be the saviour
of Patel and his ilk for a long time.
Rajneesh De in Mumbai