AZURE ADOPTION SERVICES

Our customer is the first and currently the only express delivery company in Romania offering same-day shipping to national and international destinations.

With more than 14 years of experience in the romanian courier industry, the company is an outstanding example of success through innovation – they invested massively in technology in order to build a business model that is easily adaptable to market conditions and to quickly respond to the needs of their customers.

With a digital-first philosophy, by shifting to the cloud and embracing open source technologies, the company underwent a spectacular digital metamorphosis and 7-fold increase in revenue in just 4 years.

Our shared journey to reinvent the customer’s delivery system and revolutionize customer experience, began in 2017, with a 3-year goal to build a scalable logistics software platform and modernize the entire IT infrastructure to support an ambitious business growth plan:

• Expand operations and revenue at a very high pace 
• Achieving the best SLA of all couriers on the market: to deliver 90 out of 100 parcels on time
• Increase the coverage network 

Zitec was the company chosen by the customer to lead this fundamental digital transformation and, until 2020, we have successfully built various disparate components that would represent a scalable foundation to serve the accelerated business growth:

• The core software system was built from scratch by Zitec, covering all areas of the business – from parcel delivery management to invoicing, courier incentive and payout management
• Software development of a Warehouse Management System (WMS) to integrate the new logistic infrastructure into the company’s new core software system. The Warehouse Management System (WMS) supports daily activity in the logistics center for 450 employees and the entire fleet transiting the hub. Up to 35,000 packages are processed each hour.
• Software development of the Onboarding application for registering new customers in the customer’s network network.
• Development of the software controlling over 1000 lockers and integration with the core system
• Migration of existing infrastructure to the cloud in order to provide resiliency (improved uptime) and scalability

No year comes close to 2020 in terms of impact on the courier industry and society as a whole, as the onset of the pandemic resulted in a sharp rise in demand and forced logistics companies to quickly scale in order to ensure prompt delivery of essential goods to large masses of people who were suddenly confined to their homes.

Given these circumstances, our customer once again turned to Zitec and asked us to come up with an accelerated transformation plan that would ensure swift scaling of the operations platform as well as to define a strategy and solution for storing and analyzing large volumes of data.

The solution – Embracing open source technologies and the cloud

Because the customer’s needs required a multitude of competencies, we started with a unified digitalization strategy and then delegated the implementation of each project to specialized teams.

The core operations platforms were built exclusively on open source technologies – Linux, PHP & Symfony framework for the application environment, MySQL and Redis for data storage, Docker for application packaging and delivery, RabbitMQ for asynchronous tasks and, of course, Microsoft Azure as the infrastructure platform. The application was built to easily scale horizontally to several times its current size and leverages managed cloud services in order to reduce operational overhead and ensure high availability and resilience.

The infrastructure team made sure that all the services were properly secured using encryption for both data in transit and at rest, a single entry point for all web traffic thanks to Application Gateway and its built-in Web Application Firewall. 

One of the most impactful wins for last year was the adoption of Azure Synapse Analytics as the company’s platform of choice for a multitude of data warehousing scenarios, complementing their existing BI stack.

Throughout 2020, our customer was able to:

• increase the revenue by 100% and scale the platform beyond the initial estimates
• increase the locker network by ~250%, reaching close to 1000 deployments
• define a long-term data warehousing strategy that will help them access essential reports in near-real time
• successfully execute a record-breaking Black Friday event that translated into over 7.000.000 delivered packages, and approximately 150.000 new customers acquired through digital channels.

Microsoft Azure played a significant role in the company’s successful digital transformation and the platform now powers all vital areas of the company – from the operations platforms to BI (Qlik and Synapse), physical locker management, parcel sorters and many others.