Airliners-India.com

karatecatman · Guest

ECONOMIC TIMES
How FedEx delivers goods at your doorstep

11 Dec 2009
Moinak Mitra
ET Bureau

When Munish Rajpal in a Hitachi warehouse at Delhi's smoky Mayapuri Industrial Area received his pack of CD-ROMs from Guangzhou, his relief was More Pictures
perceptible enough for FedEx delivery boy Ramesh Kumar to break into a smile. And a happy customer is a happy Taarek Hinedi. As the managing director of FedEx Express' India Operations, Hinedi is driving growth for the $34-billion courier giant from Memphis. It's been 12 years since FedEx first set up shop in India, and in that time it has amassed some 3,000 local employees and built a sterling reputation among customers. "Good enough is never good enough for us," says Hinedi.

Standing on the tarmac of the cargo section of the Indira Gandhi International Airport, facing the just-landed FedEx MD-11 from Paris, Hinedi braves a November drizzle as he takes CD into the circuitous world of logistics that transports a parcel from Timbuktu to Delhi in record time. It's 4:15 pm and the cargo carrier will dock here for an hour before heading out to Shanghai. Goods have to be offloaded and new containers carted in; there's no time to waste. More than anywhere, at FedEx time is money (FedEx has a money back guarantee on delayed deliveries ). Hinedi quickly circumambulates 'Jamie' -that's the name of the plane - to demonstrate safety features, including the anti-tipping device fixed to the rear wheel of the aircraft.

Between its upper and lower decks, Jamie can carry 180,000 pounds of consignment. Tonight it has flown in 60,000 pounds worth. The tarmac is buzzing with FedEx workers trying to unload from the aircraft's forward belly, the aft (rear), the aft bulk, the top side and the main deck that alone is capable of carrying 100,000 pounds. Their job starts now - to deliver the consignments in the next 12-18 hours - for consignees, they know, won't be quick to forgive them delays.

In Jamie's cockpit, while readying for Shanghai, the next destination, Captain Robert Allen sports an Electronic Flight Bag, an electronic information management device that helps him perform flight management tasks easily and efficiently. The controls in the cockpit are also designed for safety and timeliness, with access to every function of the aircraft, even a button to detect and extinguish fire.

A few metres away is FedEx's 26,000 sq.ft. warehouse, a part of the 52,000 sq.ft. office space allotted to the courier company in the international airport. In courier parlance, that's the hub, the first port of call for the goods from where they're either sent to the rest of the country via other aircraft, or disposed off locally to service centres (spokes) that serve to facilitate further distribution to the end-consumer , or the consignee. All that after customs clearance. Uniquely, FedEx has in-house customs clearance at not just the Delhi facility, but also in Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad . In other words, landed goods are cleared from the airside (before customs clearance) to the landside (after customs clearance) by a dedicated team of customs officials in less than 45-60 minutes.

That also explains why the American-Syrian managing director of FedEx India constantly speaks of "custodial control" over the shipments. The company doesn't just own the aircraft, even customs is a homegrown activity that further brings down the time factor. And get this, even before Jamie landed, the shipment papers were submitted to the customs by the FedEx administration for necessary clearance. "Customs only look for suspicious shipments and the administration looks into what's going on in the warehouse," says the 40 year-old Hinedi, a stockbroker-turned-FedEx loyalist who has been with the company for half his age and started out right at the bottom as a porter loading containers in Washington.

Out of the box

Meanwhile the containers from Jamie have arrived at the hub. The floors of the hub incidentally are fitted with rollers, as are the floors of Jamie itself, to facilitate rapid movement of containers. The staff in FedEx purple run around them in curiously thick shoes. Hinedi says these are special shoes that can withstand 2,500-pounds of compression . It's hard not to immediately imagine a huge container falling on your little toe.

The ante-chamber of the hub has horseshoe-shaped upper and lower belts that load the goods on arrival (imports) to the left and is also used for exiting goods (exports) from the country, to the right. "Twin belts make the sorting that much easier," says Hinedi, adding that most courier companies go by a solo belt with all parcels and documents for the country bundled in a straight line. "The upper belt is for trans-shipment , where consumers leave instructions not to clear customs in Delhi but in their respective places (at times, local customs officials may be well-versed in the nature of goods that arrive locally) and the lower belt is for shipments that need to be cleared in and around Delhi (like Rajpal's shipment of CDROMs )," informs Hinedi. And that includes the satellite towns of Noida, Faridabad, Gurgaon and the entire northern region. The entire process of unloading to the hub and on to the belts has taken 20 minutes.

As workers wheel in the containers from the aircraft, we notice there are bar codes attached to each of them that hold information about the packs inside. As containers are emptied out and parcels and documents sorted to pass through the twin belts and X-Ray machines, we head out to the middle portion of this hub. This is the customs area with an X-Ray screening room and a GE Vapour Tracer 2 for the detection of explosives.

It has been about 40 minutes since the consignments have landed , and they need to be delivered in the next 12-18 hours. Save the ones that end up in the 'cage' . That's the dingy two-compartment cell next to the customs area. At first glance, it's like a room filled with junk. But these are actually goods that have been detained by customs. At this point we are told there are 57 packages in there. According to Hinedi, that's the best rate in India - somewhere between 50-65 at any given time. "If detained, customers either give us the option to abandon or return the pack to them," says Hinedi. But after customs clearance, the packs just move out of the door for forward destinations countrywide or to the local service centres for northern distribution. And the entire process can be tracked by the client or the consignee through either the company's call centres or online. With 263 facilities for dispatch in India servicing about 600 cities, the north accounts for the heaviest trade in the country with 63 such facilities.

The next day, we're up at the crack of dawn to take stock of Rajpal's CD-ROMs that have arrived by the early morning flight from Guangzhou. After the CD-ROMs make their exit from the hub, it takes about 30 minutes to reach FedEx's Mayapuri Service Centre, from where 16 vans and four trucks service six routes across north and west Delhi. This is where the chirpy 29-year-old delivery boy Ramesh Kumar comes in -loading the CD-ROMs and other consignment for about an hour and then navigating the bylanes of the industrial area along with the driver. He's carrying a power pad that resembles a rectangular remote with a wide screen, constantly online with GPRS. This is by far the most vital link in the entire chain, for when the delivery of CD-ROMs was made to Munish Rajpal at the Hitachi warehouse 15 minutes after starting out from the service centre, Ramesh Kumar took the consignee's digital signature on the power pad. The esign is then transferred straight into the system. Ramesh Kumar, too, signs out with a glint in his eye as he heads out for the next delivery.

FedEx facts file

FedEx Corp. revenue: $34 billion

Employees: Over 275,000 employees worldwide

Packages per day: More than 6.5 million packages

Fleet of aircraft: 669 aircraft

Vehicles: More than 75,000 vehicles