Introduction to Blue Dart Courier Services
Blue Dart is South Asia’s largest courier services provider and is the largest of the Global Service Participants of FedEx. Beginning its operations in November, 1983 from its headquarters in Mumbai, India, Blue Dart along with its partner DHL today covers 21,000 domestic locations and more than 220 countries. To go about its logistics, Blue Dart – DHL operates 3 737 class Boeings and 4 757 class Boeings. With annual revenue of approximately 15,000 million while operating roughly 7,400 vehicles across its operations.

Supply Chain Model in Blue Dart
Blue Dart follows a Hub and Spoke model. Disaggregation and aggregation happens at the collection point, then the Distribution Centre / Warehouse and then at the Franchisee offices across thousands of destinations. IT Infrastructure in Blue Dart includes Oracle DBs, Java servers and Java Applets. The disadvantage of having a hub and spoke model for a courier service is that all packages have to go through the distribution center irrespective of their source and destination.

Tracking in Blue Dart
Consignment tracking in Blue Dart is through waybill / reference number databases maintained meticulously on the company’s Oracle servers. All of the tracking services offered by Blue Dart is free of cost and is offered to basically retain customers. Two of Blue Dart’s tracking services are PackTrack and ShipDart. The formers is for clients who want be involved in logistics, distribution and inventory through access to Blue Dart servers and the latter is for regular shippers who need complete control over the shipping and tracking processes and requires the clients to download files and software on a Personal Computer at their site.

Handling of Fragile Material
The handling of the fragile materials is done through a special type of packing with the bubble cover packing material. The bubble cover packing material is use mainly to safeguard the material from the different handling risks for the material to be transported. It is made up of polyethylene resin or sometimes made up of transparent plastic film. This helps in overcoming the shocks and also against the vibrations that occur during the transportation.

Advantages Disadvantages
Inexpensive Toxic waste
Good protection for the material Storage difficulties
Cost effective packing material (less quantity used) Flammable hazardous
Environmental friendly (Reusable & Recyclable)
Anti-static (designed mainly for Electro Static Discharge in electronics products)
Light weight & easily disposable
Impact resistant

Service Level Agreements
Blue Dart has 5 different types of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on the type of service provided.
• Domestic Priority: For goods couriered domestically by Blue Dart (BD) agents or employees through any media except planes
• Apex: Blue Dart in collaboration with Blue Dart Aviation Limited has its own aircraft that it uses to courier goods
• SurfaceLine: Goods shipped by road by BD agents or employees
• Airport-to-Airport: For domestic transfer; Goods shipped by BD’s own aircraft, but loading and unloading done mostly at the airport
• International Carrier: For cross-country services
The various SLAs specific to each of these services have been explained in the appendix owing to limitation of space.

Achieving SLAs
In logistics, the difference between success and failure is closely linked to the supply/value chain integration, which comprises of two distinct processes:
1. The delivery of goods to the customer in the most reliable transit period (and preferably the shortest) possible.
2. The reverse flow of acknowledged, signed delivery records without which, in many cases, recovery of bills are virtually impossible.

Services and key operating features
Blue Dart's Domestic Priority service provides the customer with a wide distribution network, time-definite deliveries and a track and trace system with real-time feedback on the status of each shipment. Surfaceline is an economical door-to-door, ground distribution service for shipments of 10 kg and above which comes with some advantages like - pick up at source, regulatory clearances and an economical tariff. The airport to airport service has no cooling period, late night cut-off & early morning deliveries and the large capacity is served by the dedicated air fleet. Dark Apex is a solution for commercial shipments of 10 kg and above that require regulatory clearances. Some of the features of Dart Apex are: payment on delivery, insurance arrangement, single window clearance and the installation of Power Dart in customer premises to enable him to get hourly updates.

Action Plan In Case of Non-Availability of Customer
On the day of delivery, when the courier person brings the shipment to the point where the delivery has to be made, it checks if the concerned person is available or not. In case the person is not available, the delivery boy calls up the available phone number to ask about the availability. If the person confirms that he is not available for that time being, the delivery boy places a ‘Sorry to have missed you’ card (photograph attached) containing the details of the shipment and the phone number to be contacted.
The concerned person on coming back can get the information of the missed shipment through this card (even if his phone number was not reachable earlier). In a few days, a trial is made again to deliver the goods at the doorstep. If unsuccessful after this point, Bluedart calls up the customer a total of three times from its own side. The shipment remains in the local warehouse/office for a total of 2 weeks during which they call 3 times. Due to the huge stress on customer care, in spite of the heavy traffic of orders, Bluedart maintains spare inventory space for such orders. However, there is a limit to which they can keep such orders which in this case is limited to 14 days from the date of delivery during which they call the customer a total of 3 times to pick up the parcel. The customer can contact them on his own as well and go to pick up the parcel from the designated place which they tell over the phone.
Also, if no one claims the parcel in those 14 days which they have kept as a buffer, the article of concern is shipped to the main office from the distribution centre where it was kept. Here, it is kept for a total of 30 days in anticipation that someone might contact for the same. After this period of 30 days gets over, the parcel is shipped back to the person who sent it in the first place.

Handling Non-Deliveries and Quality-Deficient Deliveries
Customers are given the facility to provide alternative instructions to the standard delivery format at any point of the transit, prior to the delivery. This ensures that customers can alter the delivery destinations and timings within the same area to their comfort.
To prevent non delivery, Bluedart employs a bar code based tracking at every single point of contact of the goods. The data at every point thus gets recorded in their internal systems and in every 2 hours, an update is also available so that the customers can track the status of their order at different points.
The internal tracking at every point uses this system of bar coding ensures that the orders do not get lost in the process. An important thing worth noting about Bluedart when it comes to quality confirmation is that the high cost of courier in the case of Bluedart is because all shipments, except the fragile ones, are insured by default. This means that any breakage or damage to the shipment in the case of non-fragile items is taken care of by Bluedart and the customer is duly compensated according to the terms and conditions signed.

Recommendations
Blue Dart has reached closed to six-sigma standards in its processes. The delivery of goods is made in a reliable way with the shortest time period. The courier company has even managed the reverse flow of 100% of its signed delivery records which is one of the major problem faced by the industry. Following recommendations are proposed for its effective implementation of exiting processes:
1. Customer Care – Online complaint/review sites gives an indication about the delay in solving customer queries. Hence a proper standard needs to be set to solve the queries. The services may be improved using ‘Live Chat’ feature at their site.
2. Smart Truck – Intelligent vehicle with capabilities to calculate ideal sequence for shipments and real time GPS to optimize route and avoid jams. These vehicles, currently used in Bangalore only, can be launched in other metro cities which would improve service quality, reduce cost, save time and is environmental friendly.
3. Tracking Status – In certain occasions, the tracking status does not give the exact location of the consignment. Further information regarding the delivery status due to non-availability of consignee needs to be updated on site for better information to the consignor. Hence improvement in Tracking System using modern day techniques can be done.