Transportation & Logistics
Application Development
About the Client
Founded in 1917; the organization is a famous fourth-generation family business that provides superior logistics and warehousing services. As a superior third-party logistics provider (3PL), the organization offers its customers various options to accommodate their transportation needs, such as pool distribution, LTL, private and fleet warehousing, and cross-dock, to name a few. With its immense network of partners, the organization provides services across US and Canada.
Business Challenge
The 3PL works with a broad network of carriers, offering a variety of standard and specialized equipment such as dry vans, refrigerated trucks, flatbeds, and more. The Operations Center required an integrated view that combined inventory status at warehouses owned by them with locations and status of the trucks operated by their Carrier partners. This would allow the freight supervisors to find the quickest and most cost-effective shipment options to maximize fleet utilization and improve load efficiency. At the same time, shippers would be able to track the status of their orders in real time as it transits through the Carrier network.
The aging technology of the existing platform and limited options with off-the-shelf solutions to integrate with Carrier’s IT systems constrained their ability to consolidate data into a single environment. A contemporary cloud-based solution was needed to provide seamless access to the applications to the 3PL operations staff and customers alike. The organization decided to invest in a bespoke, custom cloud application with robust API interfaces for rapid Carrier/client onboarding and an advanced responsive UX for seamless desktop, web, and mobile access.
Trigent Solution
Developing a customized Logistics Management Software (LMS)
The organization partnered with Trigent to leverage its technical and domain expertise.Trigent’s team expeditiously participated in a two-week knowledge exchange effort to understand the company’s existing processes and data flows. The discovery phase included multiple collaborative discussions on architecture, and technical stack, among many other aspects.
A single-view LMS web application to enhance the supply chain
Trigent’s team of architects designed a highly scalable Cloud-Native SaaS application. The contemporary and forward-looking architecture was built in the Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure with HTML 5 and ReactJS as the UI Layer.
Leveraging Swagger, the team provided a secured API framework to extract large volumes of data concerning web service orders, delivery, user and entity management (Customer, carrier, broker, stores), Invoices (account receivable, account payable, fuel prices and surcharges), and notifications (email notification for delivery completion, invoice status update, and user invitation).
Multiple console applications developed with the Microsoft .Net framework fetched data from existing dispatch applications, OEM software like PCS, QuickBooks and AlJex and from Carrier partners via secure API interfaces. The data transit and encryption were highly secured as the team provided fine-grained access control and permissions to select employees, partners and carriers.
To improve efficiency and simplicity, enterprise-level integrations were done wherein data regarding shippers, pool providers, carriers, and inbound and outbound orders were integrated into the LMS to orchestrate and fulfill numerous orders. Moreover, the LMS web application also worked in conjunction with the organization’s existing EDI platform to facilitate detailed invoicing processes. The seamless integration ensured scalability, seamless performance, and reliability.
The well-designed navigation of the next-gen web application improved usability and provided end-to-end visibility from order processing to distribution. Furthermore, leveraging highcharts, dashboards with custom widgets were created to provide several scheduled reports on shipment delivery, inbound projections, and performance, to name a few.
Client Benefits:
The microservices architecture enhanced scalability, optimized cloud resources, and improved flexibility. By providing seamless integrations, the next-gen LMS web application also enabled the organization to:
- Integrate systems that eliminated manual data gathering and updates resulting in 100% error-free order and invoice processing.
- Seamlessly complete over 760,000 deliveries while covering over 33 million miles.
Technology Stack:
