Analysis of IT system specifications and protocols for drone courier service

Assignment Taken

Analysis of IT requirements in Pushpak drone courier service venture

Case Understanding

Since rise of e-commerce, hyper-local delivery models have seen steep adoption among businesses and added to customer's ease. The next big thing in hyper-local delivery is use of drones, which is largely in experimental phase. According to the Print, the Indian drone market size is set to grow steeply from $1.21 billion in 2021 onwards. Hence, this is a ripe time for Pushpak to make presence as a drone enabled courier company in the market. The drone division is working to achieve breakeven in year 1, establish brand and capture market size in the process. For breaking even in the first year of operations our major business model will be focused on B2B services in which we will tie up with major food delivery partners, pharmaceuticals, and other 3pl providers. The IT systems are hence required to be robust and flexible to allow different user groups to use the services. The IT systems shall also assist digital marketing efforts to establish brand and capture large market size as a first mover.

BCS Solution Summary

The drone delivery business requires IT system to automate customer interaction, operations, accounting, and maintenance. Automation reduces the time required in operations and minimizes employee fatigue. Setting a strong IT base now will enable steady expansion of business, as well as allow increasing the number of deliveries done per day. Analytics on the generated user data, feedback and records of the delivery can be used to optimize process and marketing campaign further. The training on IT systems for the users need to be prepared by the IT department. The business faces risk of security as in control hack of drones and data breach threats.

Solution

The proposed customer journey consists of customer booking the service through web portal and the drone management system handling the pickup, route creation and drop off events efficiently.

Event log is generated along the journey and communicated to the customer. Event log shall be stored as record for future reference.

IT intervention is required in the following areas:

Customer interaction

The customers need to be able to book courier service online.

For year 1, B2B business arm will be armed. For B2B businesses, we require a portal for booking the deliveries. Required features of the portal are:

• Low latency/ quick response rate
• High load resilience (high performance)
• Selection of weight category of load
• Recipient address input/ locate on map
• Order queuing / scheduling feature
• Live tracking of courier
• Sender module to confirm attachment of good to drone
• Possible integration with B2B clients’ sales platform for automated booking

In B2B business, the client business shall update order queue and store the record of each delivery. The records shall be used to find the net cost per month or as required.

The B2C business arm will be operational from the next year. In the B2C business, the feature of pick-up and drop shall be enabled. Further, user experience needs to be smooth, from the landing page till booking delivery and payment portal.

 

Drone management system

Both channels will be integrated to the drone management software. The drone management system is expected to have the following modules:

Climatic Module: Monitors climate conditions and raises alarm in case of intense heat, high wind speed or heavy rainfall – conditions unfit for drone flight.

Receiver Module: intimate customer via sms, phone call or email to confirm that they will collect the package.

Sender Module: for sender to signal that the package has been attached correctly and the drone is ready to be operated.

Route module: Creates route based on the mapped topography and climate conditions.

Camera module: to control drone in flight by visually guiding by pilots.

Drone tracking module: monitor status of drone and its location.

Administrative Panel: allows admin to manually approve or reject a flight

 

Cyber security

Drone security – Selection of drone operating system requires compatibility with the hardware feature, resistant to hacking as well as secure connection to the controller (example – seL4 OS). The next aim is to have encrypted virtual network to prevent the connection being intercepted by hackers.

Website security – The development of websites by software developers should be done under strict security guidelines. Further, installing SSL certificate, using firewall, reducing XSS vulnerabilities, minimizing third party api exposures can prevent website hacking.

Data security – the accessibility can be controlled by limiting control to chosen people in organization with rights to edit the data about orders and customers. The data shall be stored in cloud servers with service of encryption and retrieved through secure apis.

 

Making IT policies & training procedure

To prevent IT related security risks, it is required that the employees are well trained and aware of hacking tricks like phishing and are trained to use the software systems wisely. Further, the instructions can be written on the landing website or application for B2C users, and a demo be provided to the B2B customers. The policies such as security protocols, security incident response, data encryption and disaster recovery policies shall be reframed from company’s existing policies for the same.

 

Cloud disaster recovery and data backup

The websites are to be hosted on cloud servers. Cloud disaster recovery ensures that alternate servers are ready in case of website crashes. Further, hosting on cloud will ensure scalability if the traffic is high. In case of DDoS attacks, while firewall can prevent a crash of website, switching requests to alternate server will ensure seamless user experience.

The user data as well as transactions data is to be stored on cloud. In addition to data security through access control and encryption, a possible case is accidental deletion of data. To prevent data loss, automatic cloud backup can be kept saving versions of data over 3-7 days to check for consistency and recover any unintentional change.

 

Analytics on web portal, event records & feedback text mining

Use of google analytics on the marketing efforts can help to make focused ads in the longer run as we prepare to move in the B2C business next year. Identification of most used services and problems in the B2B web-portal can also be done by use of metrics such as time spent on each page. Optimizing the portal will save booking effort by B2B users and add to customer satisfaction.

Analyzing event records reveals the phase causing most delay in the delivery process, such as trouble in attaching load to drone, impediments to drone when moving through a certain area or lack of understanding by recipient. Understanding such points can help remove bottlenecks from the process and maintain performance of the company.

Further, the collection of feedback from end recipients of courier and B2B users by text mining can reveal deficiencies in the process or IT infrastructure. The IT department shall include new features in IT points in the operation process to solve commonly occurring issues. Regular evaluation of feedback also allows to understand customer sentiment towards the brand. The marketing team can leverage this input to design campaigns better.

 

Expenses estimate

Cost of website and app for B2C customers: Rs. 1,00,000

Cost of portal for B2B customers: Rs. 50,000

Integration with google maps or alternatives: Rs. 10000 per month (Rs. 120,000 per year)

Hosting charges: Rs. 1000 per month (Rs. 12,000 per year)

Total: Rs. 2,82,000

Conclusion

With such IT systems and policies in place, the organization will be able to: - Deliver smooth customer experience from booking till delivery and payments - Enable drone operations with route optimization - Automate tracking of events from both sender and receiver side - Reduce time required to plan flight - Secure operations and ensure continuity through security measures and redundancy - Disaster recovery in case of security breach and avoid data loss - Regular process optimization by use of analytics All the above developments will enable a robust and scalable system in place for the drone courier service to grow and achieve its promised record timing of delivering the goods under 15mins till for 5km distance range.

Attached File Details

View Attachment file (Drone_Management_System.PNG) View Attachment file (Proposed_Customer_Journey.PNG) View Attachment file (Team Valorant_NMO.pptx)