SiCepat Ekspres Modernizes Logistics Operations for Business Agility on AWS

Established in 2014, SiCepat Ekspres is one of the largest last-mile delivery companies in Indonesia. Its partners include major e-commerce businesses such as Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Bukalapak. 

SiCepat Ekspres experienced a business upturn from 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic triggered an ecommerce surge in Indonesia. The company’s daily deliveries grew from 300 thousand to 800 thousand packages, reaching almost 3 million packages, a day during major sales events.

To meet the growing needs of its Indonesian customers, the company quickly grew its country coverage from 700 logistics branches in 2019 to over 1,000 branches in 2020. “However, we realized that an on-premises infrastructure would not be sustainable for our rapid business growth,” says Admiral Wiem, head of cloud infrastructure at SiCepat Ekspres.

An on-demand, robust IT infrastructure is key to its business success and future growth. SiCepat Ekspres chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred service provider to migrate its on-premise IT operations to the cloud. It recognized that the AWS team demonstrated a higher level of support compared to other cloud providers. 

The company’s core logistics system now runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for secure and resizable compute capacity, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to scale database resources and automate support for peak seasons. 

To improve its operations with data insights, SiCepat Ekspres uses AWS Glue to automate their ETL pipelines at scale. This enables them to move large amounts of data from their transactional databases to the company’s central data lake stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), a highly scalable and secure serverless storage system. In addition, SiCepat Ekspres uses Amazon Redshift and Amazon Athena to process and query large amounts of data to generate operational metrics and key data insights to support their fast growing business. 

“AWS services have given us the scalability and cost optimization we need, plus improved operational efficiency with no incidents and no downtime. During peak seasons, we can scale our delivery capacity by up to 300 percent in just minutes,” says Wiem.

SiCepat Ekspres currently processes almost 30 TB of operations data daily. It analyzes the data to gain operational visibility of its fleet, pickups and deliveries, is exploring using machine learning to predict spikes in delivery demands. This will allow SiCepat Ekspres to proactively provision resources and streamline its operations, resulting in fewer delivery delays and higher customer satisfaction. 

SiCepat Ekspres is very appreciative of AWS Enterprise Support, which provides programs and engagement activities to help the company grow and optimize its core logistics system on the AWS Cloud. Wiem shares that AWS goes beyond providing recommendations on which cloud services to use, helping SiCepat Ekspres optimize its costs through sharing resources such as AWS Well-Architected. 

“AWS is not just a vendor, but a close ally in building SiCepat Ekspres’s business and our engagement with AWS is essential to our business growth. Thanks to AWS training sessions, our operations and IT teams are empowered to drive growth and efficiency with cloud technology,” says Wiem. “With e-commerce scaling to new heights, we are confident of our agility and scalability to keep up with the surge in demand in the future.”