Transportation & Logistics
Application Development
We’re delighted with the quality of work that Trigent has produced. The team performed incredibly well and has been engaged throughout the project. Trigent is the best third-party partner we have worked with.
About the Client
The client is an American logistics company that offers worldwide freight and cargo transportation services, predominantly for mid-market shippers. With experience spanning over seven decades, the company develops innovative and customized supply chain solutions for its customers. Combining technology, company-wide expertise, and commitment to intimate customer experience, the company aims to provide solutions that create high visibility, control, and flexibility in the supply chain.
Business Challenge
A customer experience that provides transparent, real-time information is at the core of the supply chain solutions that are built by the company. Therefore, having a single view of the consignment status across all stages of the shipment is highly critical.
The company’s existing customer portal for tracking the shipment status was built with older technology. Complex high-volume transactional data related to booking, shipments, and purchase orders were stored in the company’s legacy Database Management System (DBMS). This transactional data was accessed via a green screen console with a text-only interface. The legacy platform lacked several features required for a seamless user experience.
To provide a contemporary digital experience to its customers while safeguarding its earlier investment where possible, the company opted to re-design its existing customer frontend interface while maintaining its existing DBMS at the backend.
The next-gen web application needed to have the following capabilities:
Combined view of existing customers accounts and shipments
Enhanced usability with a Graphical UI
Ensuring consistent theme and layout across services
Compatibility with multiple browsers such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox
Trigent Solution
To make its complex legacy application user-friendly and provide a cutting-edge customer experience, the company partnered with Trigent to leverage its user experience/user interface (UI/UX) capabilities.
Trigent team defined an approach to modernizing the application through its 4D model:
Trigent team expeditiously engaged in a knowledge transfer effort to understand the product, existing data flows, and functional requirements to build the new user interface (UI). A series of collaborative discussions regarding the architecture and enhancements needed for contemporary technology was included in the discovery phase.
Trigent designed an enterprise-quality application that was well-integrated, seamless, and agile. Leveraging Trigent’s Product Engineering expertise, the company developed the next-gen customer portal. The next-gen portal was a Java-based web application. The team built a multi-layered application with a long-term approach to handling high traffic loads and ease of use. The team modernized the presentation layer leveraging several UI components such as HTML5, Angular 4, CSS3, NG Bootstrap, and jQuery to provide an enhanced user experience. The presentation layer interacted with the business layer to perform specific actions with regard to user events and data access. The components in the business layer further interacted with the data layer.
Additionally, the company wanted to retain its technological investment by maintaining its existing IBM DB2 DBMS in the backend.
Working alongside the company’s development team, Trigent co-developed several APIs that helped them gain access to its existing DBMS and present it on the new customer portal. The new interface was a smooth transition for customers and was deployed on the IBM WebSphere application server.
Additionally, by leveraging several tools such as Spring MVC and JDBC, the team was able to generate the following reports (and share them with the customer through email):
Performance report
Activity report by carrier
Activity by destination
Loading report by vessel
Air-freight shipment report
Active bookings report
Client Benefits:
The revamped customer portal enabled the company to:
- Provide transparent, real-time status for all customers, load and shipment types, thereby enhancing its CX
- Secure EDI data exchange - 10,000 per day
Technology Stack:
