US Logistics Leader Enhances CX With Live Shipment Status Updates With Optimized Use Of Existing Technological Investments

An American logistics company aspired to provide a contemporary digital experience to its customers while safeguarding its earlier investment where possible. To make its complex legacy application user-friendly and provide a cutting-edge customer experience, the company partnered with us to leverage its user experience/user interface (UI/UX) capabilities. We designed an enterprise-quality application that was well-integrated, seamless, and agile.

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

Our team defined an approach to modernizing the application through its 4D model: Our 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. Our team designed an enterprise-quality application that was well-integrated, seamless, and agile. Leveraging our 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, we 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