Low-code for business value at Emirates Logistics India

Emirates Logistics India is part of a diversified business group of companies which has been growing its presence in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.

The group operates in several industries, including shipping logistics, supply chain, retail, travel and tourism, information technology, financial services, hospitality, education, and manufacturing. It's headquartered in Dubai and operates in over fifty countries.

Emirates Logistics India has its head office in Mumbai and operates across India. The company has achieved substantial business value from the custom applications its small team implemented with Zoho Creator. Here is its low-code story.

Ramping up with Zoho Creator at Emirates Logistics India

Zoho Creator is a low-code development platform that enables businesses to quickly build custom applications without needing extensive coding knowledge.

Emirates Logistics India's tech team used Zoho Creator to improve the company’s operations by improving efficiency, streamlining workflows, and reducing manual errors.

The company has a four member IT team. Gaurav Kakkar, system process manager, currently handles most of the development in Zoho Creator by himself, with the support of one another colleague.

The team evaluated multiple platforms, eventually choosing Zoho Creator because it provided both cost and support advantages. In addition, Zoho offered Emirates Logistics India training at no additional charge, which enabled the team to quickly ramp up product development during the trial phase.

Emirates Logistics India implemented Zoho Creator in 2018. At that time, the company’s objective was to enhance productivity across the organization. Company leadership also wanted software that would give them the flexibility to continue development as the organization used the new software.

The first application the team developed in Zoho Creator was the Ocean Module. The Ocean Module bridged the front office (customer support) and back office.

The goal of the app was to increase productivity, helping the customer support team focus on getting work done by talking to customers about new business. This also helped Emirates Logistics India reduce their dependency on email, where the chances of mistakes were higher.

More recently, Emirates Logistics India has used several Zoho Creator modules to connect its EMITRACK front-office application. For example, customers receive live email alerts from the system. The same milestones are available in their mobile application.

The application also provides the transparency necessary to see which salesperson a customer spoke with and on which date. Customers can also schedule meetings through the app itself, so the salesperson can connect with them directly.

The app also enables customers to search ports around the world. If a customer wants to ship to a particular country, they simply type the name of the country and the app will show them all the ports in the vicinity.

Ongoing success with Zoho Creator

When Emirates Logistics India first implemented Zoho Creator, the team focused on working to resolve problems in core areas, like customer service and sales. Over time they started developing different applications for multiple departments.

More recently, Kakkar and his team have been developing an application for warehouse management.

Security guards use the app to check in vehicles coming to the warehouse, bringing both documentation and cargo. The application is streamlined for users, as they simply have to click a button to complete check-in.

The Zoho Creator-based application augments, rather than replaces, Emirate Logistics India’ older warehouse management system.

The Intellyx take

Most organizations begin their low-code journey with a simple front-end app. Instead, Zoho Creator enabled Emirates Logistics India to jump right into connecting the front office to the back office—essentially starting with a rather difficult problem.

Emirates Logistics India now has 22 different apps and the team is working on the 23rd, which is also a big, complex project.

Kakkar sees his job as going beyond simply implementing various applications. He also helps to automate the processes that the company follows. Process automation is a more advanced capability than building simple user-facing apps, which is the typical starting point for low-code.

At Emirates Logistics India, they build simple user interfaces, but they also connect the front office to back-office processes, requiring integration as well as dealing with various data-centric issues.

The fact that Emirates Logistics India has been so successful building such advanced apps with low-code is certainly a testament to the abilities of the Emirates Logistics India's tech team—but make no mistake, without the ease of use and sophistication of Zoho Creator, they wouldn’t have been able to deliver such significant business value.

Copyright © Intellyx LLC. Zoho is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article is an Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used in the production of this article.