COVID-19 pandemic stunned the world economies on a short notice and affected smooth operations of big and small businesses in all sectors as it scaled. But even in those unprecedented times, there were some essential industries such as logistics, where companies were operational on the field bearing risk of virus everyday.
The company ensured utmost safety of its staff and retained the custodianship of customers’ consignments during the pandemic. The quick decision making, continued connect through internal & external communications and swift actions really changed the current adversity into opportunity for Safexpress.
On the ground level, practical challenges were often faced by the team such as employees turning up with sub-optimal health conditions that disrupted the planned roster. Working on a skeletal team made it challenging to achieve operations efficiencies, but the challenges were seized when the government released the APIs for the Arogya Setu app, Safexpress took the opportunity of unifying the application with Arogya Setu that helped immensely to track the health and risk profile of employees on real-time basis. This allowed better planning as it was able to keep a check on employees at risk in the roster and avoid last minute confusions.
To execute smooth operations continuity in all the regions amidst the crisis, Safexpress prioritize its critical resources i.e. workforce, network, partners and ensured their continuity by providing 100% safe & healthy environment and development without any compromise with clear objectives in mind to serve its customers' supply chain and logistics needs and to support the country's economy by keeping it's wheels running.
It also digitally transformed its operations & transactions to minimize the risk of physical contact and incorporated cloud-based systems that facilitated Work From Home for most of the workforce. Safety & security of employees, staff, premises and customers’ consignments was ensured by ‘no-contact’ deliveries, promoting digital payments, regular sanitization, daily thermal screening of those coming at work and religiously following all the guidelines mandated by the Government of India.
The ongoing pandemic has changed the delivery operations for the entire industry including the top 10 logistics companies in India, if not forever but for a long time coming. To avoid the spread of COVID-19, customers today are shifting their loyalty towards businesses that are guaranteeing ‘zero contact’ delivery and digital payments. Logistics companies in India have planned out their execution of operations based on the same idea as it its new but fortunately, not hard to achieve.
