Increasing the Capabilities of Package Delivery by Using Oracle Autonomous Database

Arief Rahardjo, Vice President Of Technology, PT. Tiki Jalur Nugraha Ekakurir

A known digital pacesetter in South East Asia, Indonesia’s internet economy is accelerating at a breakneck speed. A key factor in this growth is the country’s ecommerce sector, which is expected to be worth a total of $82 billion by 2025, making up almost two-thirds of the country's digital economy.

Besides driving transformation in retail and financial services, this move to online shopping is also impacting those in logistics, with increasing demand for postal deliveries and time-sensitive shipping services. However, while offering a great opportunity to those in this market, successfully providing the rapid delivery of goods is also a challenge.

One of the companies impacted is the Jakarta-based parcel delivery service, JNE. Established in 1990, the company has a presence in all significant Indonesian cities with more than 7,000 service locations and over 45,000 employees.

The need for data in real-time

Originally set up to provide the shipping of small packages and documents, JNE has grown significantly in recent years, expanding its services to include large goods transportation, logistics, and distribution services. Now, with the rise of e-commerce, it has extended to include time-sensitive, high priority delivery services through its ‘Rush Handling’ warehouse.

Facing growth in its core business in high-volume shipments, JNE needed better access to the huge volumes of data these items were generating. According to JNE’s Vice President of Technology, Arief Rahardjo, in the first six months of 2019, the company generated more than 20 million transactions per month, and volumes are beginning to rise above 1 million per day.

This challenged the organization’s existing business systems. JNE needed a strong and accurate data platform that could support its real-time requirements for delivery reports, tracking status, and other client requests.

Our business primarily focuses on sending high volumes of high/low-value goods. We need to be able to track the status of the package as it moves through its entire journey, to managing customer requests and feedback. As we connect buyers to sellers and marketplaces, there’s a lot of information involved. It is all very data-dependent, making delivery reports and analytics a critical part of our business operations.

To be able to meet these requirements, JNE recognized that it needed a more robust data platform that could adapt to changing volumes, both on a day-today basis and around; for example, festive seasons, when demand for its delivery services is at its peak. As well as helping JNE handles the size of the data, it also needed to gain more accurate, real-time access to information for various shipping reports and status tracking, especially for its B2B customers.

We know how important it is for our customers to get their goods on time and in good condition.” Rahardjo says. “We are known for our fast and reliable service, which has created a loyal customer base, but this is a competitive and rapidly changing market, and already e-commerce and time-sensitive deliveries are a growing part of our business. To ensure we can keep up with this dynamic market, we need a customizable cloud platform that fits our requirements and helps us move closer toward fulfilling our vision of becoming a leading global supply chain company.

The value of an autonomous platform

JNE already had the experience of working with Oracle to drive business transformation. Already its use of the machine learning (ML) capabilities in Oracle Management Cloud were enabling JNE to identify application and performance issues across its IT Operations. This meant they could be proactively fixed within minutes, helping staff to respond much faster to every problem, which were also reduced customer complaints by 70 percent.

So, in early 2019, executives from JNE met with Oracle to discuss the potential of Oracle’s Autonomous Database, which promised to not only provide JNE with faster access to data but also to reduce support costs by eliminating much of the need for JNE staff to maintain and tune the platform. The result was an initial pilot project.

Rahardjo says, “One of the key benefits of the autonomous data warehouse is speed. Before autonomous, to create reports against transactions that were numbering more than one million per day took a couple of hours. But with Oracle, this can be done in only two hours. We have also been able to dramatically improve the accuracy and availability of business-critical reports, in particular helping business processes around the collection and financial reconciliation.”

The ease with which new data warehouses can be set up has also been appreciated by JNE. We can now create a data warehouse environment that suits our needs in less than an hour, helping us to provide the required reports in real-time.

In addition to speed, by combing the autonomous capabilities with Oracle Analytics Cloud, JNE has been able to boost its abilities to develop and provide highly visual dashboards to its management team, and these can be done without needing a large team of developers.

Bringing in ML and automation

JNE has also been utilizing the advanced ML and automation capabilities of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse against tasks such as deployment of delivery drivers and optimization of routes, as well as to undertake root cause analysis to detect if there are any problems in the shipments.

The autonomous data warehouse is also enabling JNE to improve the performance of its database. Actions like patches and updates can be performed automatically without human intervention, bringing a new level of performance, security and efficiency, and freeing labor up to focus attention on higher-value tasks around the customer experience and innovation.

Further potential

Based on the positive outcomes so far, JNE hopes to leverage its Oracle cloud platform to further develop its digital capabilities. A new Data Recovery Centre is on the roadmap, to provide higher availability for JNE’s IT systems as well as ensuring enhanced business continuity.