About the Customer
With a presence in over 50 countries, the Singapore-based company simplifies and digitalizes last-mile deliveries through its mobile app, enabling a seamless user experience for its consumers, backend operation teams, and delivery drivers. To date, the company has completed more than 55 million deliveries on its platform and has captured over 180 million E-PODs. The majority of the customer clients are third-party logistics providers, such as Toll Group and Kerry Logistics, many of whom experienced a surge in demand for last-mile deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic. With more companies recognizing the potential for last-mile logistics technology that provides full visibility and automated delivery tracking, their new monthly sign-ups have increased by 100 percent over a period of nine months in 2020.
The Challenge
The customer launched its business on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud using solutions such as Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for database administration, AWS CodeDeploy to automate software deployments, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store and organize data. However, as its business and its customers’ operations grew, they wanted to ensure that its platform was stable and could scale to meet market demands. Furthermore, the customer relied on server monitoring systems that only alerted the operations team of issues, such as sudden loan increases or stalled server queues, which then had to be resolved internally. The operations team had to be on standby around the clock to respond to potential disruptions.
Solutions
In a move to offload its infrastructure management tasks, the company subscribed to AWS Managed Services (AMS) through Cloud Comrade, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. Cloud Comrade operates AMS on the customer behalf, facilitating access to AMS and its enterprise-grade service. AMS also reduces operational overheads and risks by automating common infrastructure activities such as change requests, monitoring, patch management, security, and backup services. Additionally, AMS provides full-lifecycle services to provision, run, and support their infrastructure. Cloud Comrade also provides support for their move to AMS through a series of workshops to understand its infrastructure setup, workflows, and operational processes. The information gathered was then translated into a technical design document to facilitate the move. Cloud Comrade also created an easy-to-use AMS operational manual. As part of AMS, the customer migrated its applications using AWS Landing Zone, a solution that seamlessly sets up a highly secure, multi-account AWS environment. It also migrated its backend processes from Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to AWS Fargate. Additionally, they used Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) to automate the deployment of containerized services, eliminating the need to manage servers or clusters. The move to AMS was completed in eight weeks, followed by refactoring applications on the AWS Cloud.
Results
Since implementing AMS, the customer has redirected 30 percent of its technological resources, in terms of time and costs, to focus on feature development. For example, with safety features becoming a priority during the COVID-19 pandemic, the company was able to respond quickly, developing a new contactless delivery feature that captures parcel recipients’ signatures remotely as an E-POD. Additionally, because AMS helped save 100 labor hours per month across a team of eight IT engineers, the company was able to develop a new function that connects ecommerce platforms directly to their customers’ accounts for full automation of order delivery tracking and fulfillment.
Given the volume and sensitivity of the data it manages, the customer also recognizes the benefit of having enterprise-grade compliance and security. AMS comes equipped with out-of-box governance, security, and compliance features that enable the company to easily meet various compliance program requirements—such as HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC, and ISO—across different countries and industries. The compliance-enabling environment on AMS has also allowed them to shorten its sales cycle from approximately six months to a few weeks by meeting customers’ requirements with greater ease. To increase its competitive advantage and build customer trust, they are currently being audited and certified for the Data Protection Trustmark (DTPM), a companywide certification that demonstrates accountable data protection practices.
