Indonesian logistics firm, SiCepat Ekspres, is collaborating with document database platform MongoDB to build new features in its app, for tracking and order fulfilment, used by its six million customers.
This has helped the company to significantly scale up operations.
Founded in 2014, SiCepat provides services for last-mile delivery, warehousing and fulfilment, and middle-mile logistics services.
Its customers include major e-commerce businesses such as Tokopedia, Shopee, Lazada, and Bukalapak.
Prior to MongoDB, SiCepat was using a simple monolithic architecture based on the relational database SQL Server on AWS.
The firm now uses MongoDB Atlas hosted on AWS, MongoDB for Mobile (formerly MongoDB Realm) and MongoDB Atlas Online Archive solutions.
SiCepat said with MongoDB Atlas, the order processing time had been reduced from three hours to roughly two minutes, which is a more than 98 percent reduction in time.
SiCepat’s CTO, Reynaldi Oeoen, told iTnews Asia that the firm runs most of its business operations using a single app that incorporates logistics data, from orders with individual e-commerce partners to pick-up and delivery by drivers and by branches in specific locations, in real-time.
He added that, by taking advantage of MongoDB's rich indexing functionality, the company’s developer teams have been able to keep data efficiently indexed for optimal query speeds.
Localised backup
Oeoen added that Atlas's Cloud Backups provide localised backup storage automatically.
“In event of an incident, the database can be easily rolled back to a previous state,” he added.
Sharing the background of the company's collaboration with MongoDB, Oeoen said as the company expanded, updating the database or incorporating new features had become increasingly difficult and time-consuming with the existing infrastructure's underlying data model.
“We decided to do some initial pilots in 2018 and then we adopted MongoDB Atlas for partners' order data and billing applications.
"This proved successful as it helped developers in moving more quickly, and the applications scaled smoothly,” Oeoen said.
During the pandemic, SiCepat’s monthly package deliveries doubled from 20 million to 40 million, a huge spike in customer activities Oeoen said.
As of today, MongoDB Atlas now manages nearly one-third of SiCepat's data, he added.
Using MongoDB Atlas, the team has built a new tool for executives to monitor key daily business metrics and a chatbot that scrapes company data and can give simple and clear answers to questions.
Added functionalities to scale up
MongoDB’s Manager, Solutions Architect Corp APAC, Himanshumali, said the SiCepat’s team maintains performance at large data volumes with a native sharding feature that distributes data across multiple machines.
Himanshumali added the indexing functionality helps the team to keep data efficiently indexed for optimal query speeds.
Going forward SiCepat is looking into using Atlas Device Sync to sync devices and the main database automatically, even when there are single outages, Oeoen said.
Additionally, the online archiving lets SiCepat set automatic rules to keep data available when it is needed but archive when no longer likely to be required, he added.
