Essay

1) Logistics and e-scm

Supply Chain Management for a Vehicle Leasing Solution provider

The client is a large vehicle leasing solution provider and an industry leader with one of the largest, most diverse fleets — more than 125,000 units - delivering customer focused services centered on renting, leasing, selling and remarketing trailers. The client operates an extensive network of more than 100 branches in Canada, the United States and Mexico.

The present system of supply chain management was studied and the challenges were identified. The client conceived a trailer management system that would allow fleets to pinpoint trailer locations. This system would not only help the client to provide value added services to its customers, but also improve asset utilization and operational flexibility. Not to limit its offering of asset tracking for units leased/rented, the client was looking at a solution, which would allow customers owning units to track their assets as well. They looked towards an offshore partner who could provide them with valuable expertise in this area. The client assigned the responsibility of overcoming the challenges to a solution provider by name Patni Computer Systems Ltd., known in short as Patni.

The solution to arrive at was supposed to allow the ever growing, client customers, to locate trailers anywhere in North America, including Mexico and Canada, Provide location information including street address, city, state, zip and country, Display roadmaps with zoom levels - ranging from street level to national level, Provide daily notifications of trailer location at factory pre-set time and a customer initiated location request, Export data for further analysis, and Allow owners to locate carriers/private fleets that carried sensitive or high value loads. The Patni developer a solution system called Asset Tracking System. This system uses a dual satellite technology for sending and receiving information for trailer locations anywhere in...