Software Developmet for Freight Forwarding Company

The Client

Client is an international freight forwarder based in US.

The Challenge

With successful development and growth of customer’s business they faced the problem of processes coordination. The broad network of partners was the key to business success and at the same time it was the impeding factor for the everyday operating procedures. Mostly the challenge was caused by prevalence of manual information processing and lack of information uniting system.

Since there was no shared information space and every partner had its own website with custom delivery calculation system, the customer had to have a specially allocated staff member to perform every day the time consuming procedures of visiting the sites, making calculations, clarifying and comparing prices, and many others.

The Scope

The main scope of the project was to customize an existing CRM system and develop new functionalities within an order management portal (OMP) for a leading carrier company to the extent sufficient for and surpassing the requirements of increasingly competitive and demanding transportation industry.

Due to the sluggish performance of the fairly outdated existing software and substantial share of manual information processing, the customer was experiencing operational difficulties and was limited both in functional and system growth opportunities.

Working on the project in collaboration with its development partner, Azoft was involved both in functional development and customization of a chosen freeware SugarCRM system, and modular development of the OMP.

The Solution

The project’s task was to broaden the functionality of the CRM system according to customer’s business needs using a more advanced set of technologies and integrate it seamlessly with the OMP. To meet the requirements under the contract the CRM system has undergone notable changes, including customization of entity changes logging mechanism and some changes related to development of a new Rights Management functionality generally uncommon for the CRM system.

Alongside with fine tuning of the existing modules, the following custom modules were created and integrated with the OMP:

• Route optimization module integrated with Google Maps
• Carrier selection module
• Order total sum specification module
• Contacts module
• Users/Employees module
• Accounts module with new intermediary modules: Account Profile, Account Billing Details, etc
• Addresses module with a Global Address Book enabling one-place storage of address information with no need to type it in many times in other modules
• Documents generation module supposed to be one of the pillars of the whole customer’s business process.

Technologies

J2EE, PHP, JavaScript, MS SQL Server, Web Services, OR-mapping tool Hibernate, SugarCRM, Google Maps

The Outcome

The solution worked out in tandem with the development partner equipped the customer with a highly effective business instrument able to unify the uncoordinated parts of customer’s information space. The transition from time consuming manual information processing to the automated document workflow permitted to cut staff costs and enhance general productivity and efficiency.

Successful work within the project brought customer’s partners to the decision to give Azoft access to the interfaces of their processing systems in order to ensure even more stable performance of the customer’s system.