SingPost - Alibaba Cloud

Logistics

Singapore

Enterprise/Public Sector

"The key reasons behind this strategic partnership are the broader Alibaba ecosystem, its proven technologies, deep understanding of the logistics industry, and their can-do attitude."

HK Puar, CIO of SingPost

About SingPost

For over 150 years, Singapore Post (SingPost) has delivered trusted and reliable postal services to homes and businesses in Singapore. Today, SingPost is pioneering and leading in e-commerce logistics and other end-to-end integrated digital mail solutions, in Singapore and around the world, in 19 markets. The suite of SingPost e-commerce logistics solutions includes front end web management, warehousing and fulfilment, last-mile delivery and international freight forwarding.

Challenge

For years, SingPost had been running its workloads across four different cloud service providers. Managing the workloads across so many different cloud environments was a challenge operationally. From a cost perspective, it could not take advantage of economies of scale, as its bargaining power with each vendor was relatively weak.

Why Alibaba Cloud

Building a centralized data and reporting platform would have required SingPost to invest in specialized resources and have a team to monitor it subsequently. One advantage of Alibaba Cloud’s products was that they were easy to configure and implement. In addition, Alibaba Cloud also provided professional services, addressing both of SingPost’s requirements. While SingPost did consider other solutions, none were able to achieve the real-time visualization performance of Alibaba Cloud’s AnalyticDB and DataV products. A further benefit in choosing Alibaba Cloud was that it addressed SingPost’s specific pain points. Alibaba Cloud also worked with SingPost to build the platform and guided them on making the data architecture. Product training, proofs of concept and enablement further convinced SingPost that Alibaba Cloud was the right partner.

Architecture

SingPost decided to consolidate most of its cloud and on-premises workloads onto Alibaba Cloud for easier management of workloads and benefit from better cost-efficiencies. In particular, Alibaba Cloud provided a platform to host SingPost’s IaaS workloads, including its core parcel/mail tracking system. Besides becoming the de-facto platform for all of SingPost’s IaaS workloads, Alibaba Cloud also provided various big data and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in the logistics domain, such as the intelligent last-mile platform, to improve its overall quality logistics business.

Values and Results

Using Alibaba Cloud enabled SingPost to achieve scalability, reliability and ease of management for its IT infrastructure. In addition, its sophisticated AI solutions facilitated the digital transformation of SingPost’s overall logistics business. HK Puar, CIO of SingPost, said: "The key reasons behind this strategic partnership are the broader Alibaba ecosystem, its proven technologies, deep understanding of the logistics industry, and their can-do attitude."

Key Results
• Consolidation of workloads onto one platform for easier management
• Cost efficiencies due to economies of scale
• Enhanced reliability and scalability of the IT infrastructure
• Greater leverage of artificial intelligence and big data to improve logistics operations

Looking Forward

Alibaba Cloud is now a key technology partner in SingPost’s digital transformation journey, as it plans several strategic initiatives to enhance its operations and service. These include building an AI dispatching system to assign parcel delivery tasks to delivery men/vehicles optimally. Data will be collected from IoT devices in vehicles, and their status and location will be visualized in real-time, facilitating vehicle routing. AI technologies will also aid warehouse utilization monitoring and predictions, contributing to cost-efficiencies. A further area where Alibaba Cloud technologies, specifically natural language processing, will be implemented is address parsing.