TCS to help P&O Nedlloyd focus on operations integration

Stanley Glancy / Pune

Shipping major P&O Nedll-oyd’s Pune-based IT services subsidiary has set up a dedicated offshore development centre in Delhi in association with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The centre will be concerned with the development of state-of-the-art software for P&O Nedlloyd’s global operations. According to Tara Basi CIO, P&O Nedlloyd worldwide, 90 percent of P&O’s IT development work will be done from this centre.

Currently, development work is being done on a new global system, which Basi said will transform the way the company does its business. Christened FOCUS, short for financial operational and customer support, the solution will take care of all the company’s internal operations. FOCUS comprises five key modules that cuts across all the critical business areas for a shipping giant. These include functionalities such as costing, applications support, financials, container management and freight management. FOCUS will also help all P&O Nedlloyd’s front and back offices to have an integrated database. The solution will also be integrated seamlessly with P&O Nedlloyd’s existing ERP system. P&O Nedlloyd will roll out the end-to-end solution being developed by TCS by the end of 2003.

“FOCUS has been designed to take maximum advantage of communication with customers. The system can support more than 100 business users at any given point of time. Built around PeopleSoft ERP, which we have deployed worldwide, the TCS solution has been designed to run all of P&O Nedlloyd’s internal operations,” said Basi.

The company is also looking at solutions for datawarehousing and datamining. All the software will be developed by TCS. The new software will then be tested in P&O Nedlloyd’s test centre in Pune before being rolled out globally. The business testing support division will put the data into the new system and monitor performance of the same. The company has developed a methodology for testing the software in a live environment. A team based out of the company’s Pune office has been fully trained in the intricacies of testing and developing test cases. This team then conducts volumetric testing to check whether the system will be able to support a certain level of volume. “We use technology to generate activity and then test the system. We have spent close to nine months training the team to conduct the testing efficiently to ensure that the system will provide trouble-free service once deployed globally,” explained Basi.

P&O Nedlloyd’s business support division (BSD), headed by Basi, is also planning to roll out the next generation of e-commerce systems. Currently, the company is in the process of making its website www.ponl.com more user-friendly for customers. Said Basi, “We have been upgrading the site every 3-4 months for the past two years after taking feedback from users.” Another portal called www.youship.com is being promoted by the company. This website is dedicated to providing high quality services and competitive rates via the Internet. The site also enables customers to book and pay at the same time. P&O Nedlloyd has tied up with various banks to enable them to offer these services. The company is also a member of Inttra, an industry portal with 15 members. Inttra currently accounts for 50 percent of the ocean-going transportation market. The portal is a one-stop online centre that enables shippers, freight forwarders, third-party logistics providers, brokers, importers and industry portals to book cargo across multiple shipping lines in a single integrated process.

The sites have primarily been designed to make information easily available to customers. Large customers can also use the website to interact electronically. The information available on the site is, according to Basi, timely and accurate, and also reduces manual processing costs.

Currently, P&O Nedlloyd is in the process of expanding its services in Chennai and Pune. The BSD, which currently employees around 290 people, will grow to 350 people by the end of this year. The company is also setting up a centre in Mumbai that will focus on back-end operations for clearing hazardous cargo.