IBM associates with Safexpress to deploy ‘PROPEL-i’, a bespoke, end-to-end cloud native logistics platform. This has been developed in collaboration with IBM Global Business Services. This digital platform would enable the company to attain agility in demand management, and to acquire advanced and flexible dynamic pricing modelling capabilities and to offer enhanced visibility and transparency for its customers.

Kapil Mahajan, group CIO, Safexpress, says, "Being a technology driven organization, our next wave of business strategy was focused on building a cognitive enterprise that can keep up with the speed of transformation around us. 'PROPEL-i', which is our new transportation management system (TMS) platform, has been built with Design Thinking at its core and centered around 4 key pillars: People, Process, Data and Technology. Its microservices based cloud native architecture will further strengthen our position as a market leader both from logistics and technology standpoint and help us respond exceptionally faster to the market dynamics while minimizing time, cost and effort on new product development lifecycle.”

Safexpress has been on digital transformation journey for the last few years and has a strong focus on technology driven business acceleration and growth. To capitalize on this significant market opportunity and fuel its growth plans, Safexpress wanted to remodel its core business processes and further expedite the adoption of next-generation technologies and digital-driven solutions. Safexpress then collaborated with IBM to design and build ‘PROPEL-i', an innovative scalable logistics platform, deployed in a secure & resilient cloud environment.

Kamal Singhani, country managing partner – IBM Services, India/South Asia adds, “‘PROPEL-i’ is a major milestone for Safexpress as well as India’s logistics sector and is a testament to the continued success of the company’s longstanding association with IBM. By leveraging our deep industry expertise and access to technological innovations including cloud & AI, Safexpress will be able to leverage the new digital platform to manage their growing business, enrich customer experiences as well as boost revenues by acquiring new accounts & by optimizing costs.”

‘PROPEL-i’ is an internal logistics operations management suite of applications custom-built by IBM Global Business Services for Safexpress. It is designed specifically with a mobile first policy which enables the field staff to work from anywhere and frees the company to migrate to a desktop-free environment which maximizes office space.

Moreover, by leveraging the container management capabilities of Kubernetes deployed on a public cloud, the ‘PROPEL-i' platform provides Safexpress with high scalability, availability and security with self-healing runtime environment. The platform’s API interface integrates with Safexpress’ customer system and enables streamlining of workflows & efficiencies in internal processes and provides industry leading integration capabilities. The project has multiple components such as customer contracts, associate contracts, booking, associate management and others.