A bundle of benefits

• Centralised monitoring of stock
• Efficient tracking of acknowledgements
• Substantial savings in communication costs
• Faster billing cycles for corporate accounts
• Cuts paperwork on statutory reporting
• Higher customer satisfaction
• Quick return on investment
• Technology - FMS had a distributed three tier architecture for local and remote branch connectivity that worked on low bandwidth (128 kbps)
• Product updates – Regular updates protected the client with regulatory changes and technology obsolescence.
• Document management - Manual documents have to be retained for 10 years at the head office. The documents included invoices, proof of delivery, lorry receipts, contracts and a maze of documents. Typical document retrieval took 10 – 20 minutes for a clerk.
• SMSbenefit – A two way SMS gateway that talks to the database for enquiries. Effective communications saved at least two clerks for head office. Calls from customers and branches flood the office from morning till evening. Sometimes the queries are pertaining to a year old consignment took hours to fetch. Here all the user had to do was to SMS the waybill number to the designated mobile ID. Direct cost of back office clerk
• Lower claims. Effective tracking of consignments from various locations would reduce the current claims by 50%. Typical transport companies pay 2 – 3% of revenues on claim settlement.
• Billing - Billing integrated with POD (Proof of Delivery). Mandatory for all consignments and one missing would mean the entire payment being held up.
• Route optimization – FIFO method of loading and route management helped faster dispatches. A wrong dispatch would result in re-routing the consignment with higher transaction cost. Each branch has a traffic controller who spent 2 - 3 hours tracking wrong dispatches.
• Statutory needs – Each truck has to copy multiple documents including sales tax declarations, vehicle manifests, octroi statements and loading and unloading sheets.