Azure Cloud Transformation Delivered a Unified Shipping Platform That Enhanced Scalability, Efficiency, and Experience for a Leading European Logistics Company

About the client

Our client is one of Europe’s leading delivery specialists, connecting retailers with customers, partners, and vendors across the UK, Europe, and around the world. With a national network of 50+ sites and 2,000 vehicles, the client provides convenient delivery choices catering to consumers’ busy lifestyles. The client is part of a Europe-headquartered global parcel, courier, supply chain, freight, and freight forwarding company. 

Challenges

The client currently catered to 10,000 customers, 11,000 unique users, and about 50,000 orders per day. However, the existing application was not suited to scaling the business from 50,000 orders/day to 130,000 orders/day. This was because the client was using an on-premises, server-based shipping application. However, these legacy, on-premises applications faced difficulties in scaling up and feature enhancements. Therefore, the client needed to transform their legacy ecosystem to a cloud-based architecture on Azure to cater to current and future business needs. The following were some of their current challenges:

• Existing systems were built on legacy technologies, a desktop application in Delphi, and a proprietary web application. 
• Fragmented operations necessitated multiple user interfaces for small and medium business customers as well as high-value customers. 
• Additional overhead for maintenance and support, especially on outdated technologies. 
• Upgrades were extremely cumbersome with a compact disc being sent to every workstation. In some cases, an engineer was required to perform the upgrade.

LTM Solution

• LTM built a unified shipping platform across the client’s business segments by providing a robust, adaptive, and scalable Azure cloud-based solution. 
• The platform provided a speedy label printing solution to handle large volume of parcel deliveries, enabling scalability. 
• The platform included a market-leading, interactive dashboard that provided a real-time snapshot of the status of all booked shipments with a delivery status summary. It gave customers a complete overview of their shipments. 
• Users could toggle between international and domestic shipments with full visibility of shipments moving through respective networks. This eliminated the need for additional BI reports. 

Benefits

Scalability and performance: The platform’s modern architecture enables high scalability and improved performance. This robust solution caters to increased e-Commerce shipping volume while driving better user experience and higher efficiency. The Unified shipping platform today handles over 10,000 customers, 11,000 unique users, and 50,000 orders per day, with the capability of scaling to 100,000-130,000 orders per day without compromising on the performance.

Transparency and visibility: The innovative platform offers complete transparency to retail customers, partners, and vendors for all the booked parcel deliveries. Complete visibility keeps the client’s customers one step ahead for all their parcel deliveries.

Ease of usage: Enhanced ease of use for users to send parcels to the UK and worldwide in just a few easy steps, either by loading the order file or creating a shipment. It also offered a convenient one-stop solution to keep track of queries raised and manage the dispatch, progress, and status of all shipments.

Handle critical shipments: The platform enhanced the ability to create “monitor lists” for critical shipments that need extra special attention, and alerts list shipments that require action for a pro-active approach.

End user satisfaction: The platform got a 91% ranking on ease-of-usage for creating shipments. Also, 4 out of 5 customers are happy with LTM’s Unified Shipping Platform.

Highlights

The unified platform spans:

• 10,000 customers.
• 11,000 unique users.
• 50,000 shipments per day.
• Expected to scale up to 100,000 to 130,000 shipments per day.
• One-stop solution for all shipments – international and domestic.