ALBASSAMI'S JOB IS NOT FEASIBLE WITHOUT IT
If you live in a country with a diverse geography and a climate characterized as being harsh, with a dry desert and great temperature extremes like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (area: 2.1 million square kilometers), and you need to move from one city to another, where the distance could be some thousand kilometers, you have two choices: to drive, or to fly and ship your car via a car transport carrier. Many people in the Kingdom prefer the second option. This has created a market for car transportation in the Kingdom that is the largest in the Middle East. Albassami was established to respond to these market needs. The Albassami International Group is considered one of the leading land transporters in the Middle East. The estimated size of the car transportation market, both inside the Kingdom and with neighboring countries, is about 2 billion Saudi riyals and is increasing considerably annually. There are more than a million cars transported inside and outside the Kingdom. Albassami International Group owns the largest fleet of carriers in the Middle East. At present, the group is operating all over the Kingdom and extends throughout the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. Throughout these years the company has focused on how to maintain business leadership in order to achieve safe and fast transportation. Every day there are more than 1,000 shipping contracts, including 2,000 to 2,500 bills of lading daily between the main branches. With the introduction of its new division of Express transportation in 2003, the group owns and allocates 170 heavy duty, medium, and light vehicles of various types for its door-to-door courier services, which operate all over the Kingdom, covering more than 45 locations. It was therefore impossible to properly handle and control the endless number of daily work options and orders related to these operations at a perfect level of service without a robust computerized system. The system needed the facility to serve specific sectors in the organization, in addition to providing information throughout the group. The system is based on clustered Dell servers running Windows 2003 and connected to over 270 Windows XP clients. The database management system, used as the backbone of the system, is Sybase Adaptive server, whereas clients use SQL Anywhere. There is replication between the server at headquarters and the client's branches. Throughout the replication, branches' data is sent to the server and aggregated to create the most updated database version, and then sent back to the branches. This means every branch has the most recent version of the client list, trucks' availability, and new shipping contracts so that any customer is able to deal with any branch at any time. The business process starts when the customer goes to a branch to ship his car to a destination within shipping areas, and the branch then creates a shipping agreement. As the database is sent from the branch to HQ every 30 minutes, an aggregated version of the database of all branches is available at HQ and thereafter sent back to all branches. The recipient branch will create a receipt entry on the system upon arrival of the truck and then an SMS message is created and sent to the customer, who will then go to the destination branch to receive the car. The shipping information system used at Albassami maintains all the sender information such as the sent car, the truck number, the sender and receiving branches, and it also sends an SMS message to the client acknowledging the arrival of the car. The system also records the client's data, and holds maintenance information. Linking the data of vehicle maintenance centers with the transportation service helps to enhance company performance and achieve better customer service. The system also enables standard reports to be provided to top management and head sectors about the productivity of each branch, resulting in accurate identification of needs for different regions and thus proper budget allocation. In addition, the system allowed a better audit on all drivers' behavior by using the output of the vehicles' tracking information. Proper performance monitoring resulted in adequate employees' appraisals and consequently loyal staff! All business processes are facilitated by the shipping system, and the knowledge extracted from the central database has enabled the management team to make sound investment and operational decisions and therefore helped the business maintain its success and leadership in the Kingdom.
Case Study Question
1. What systems are described here? What valuable information do they provide?
2. What value did the IT/IS investments add to Albassami?
3. How did implementing the Shipping Information System address the business needs and information requirements of Albassami?