Freight Forwarder Platform

A platform for freight forwarders
CLIENT
transform technologies
INDUSTRY
Logistics
CORE TECHNOLOGIES
Angular
SpringBoot
OTM
AWS
swaggger
Spring-cloud-gateway
Kafka
Spring schedular
Spring cloud
Oracle
Jenkins
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Overview
Problem Statement
Solution

Overview

We built this platform for transform technologies which is a sister company (Information Technology company ) of a large freight forwarder that has a huge presence in UAE and 11+ locations all over the world. The platform integrates with Oracle Transport Management (OTM) system and provides end-users with features that make doing business with our customers easier.

Problem statement

One of the biggest ask was to integrate the platform with OTM such that any new shipments created/updated in OTM must be available on the platform.

THE ASK

The platform was supposed to be highly scalable ... that was supposed to cater to huge data, near-real-time sync between OTM and the freight platform and support a huge number of concurrent requests. Transform technologies intend to sell this as a SaaS product to other freight forwarders too.

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We were tasked with the responsibility of getting shipment-related data from OTM in real-time. The field mapping was a big challenge.

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The documents management system was needed that would support the uploading of documents and then pushing the same to OTM. Conversely, pull the documents from OTM like BL documents and provide the document viewer to view the same.

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The platform was also supposed to provide the features like adding and submission of shipping instructions. Adding was supposed to stage the instructions and be allowed to modify them till the time it was finally submitted. The submission was supposed to update the instructions in OTM.

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User management and role-based access were yet another key ask. The shipment and accounting details were supposed to be made available based on the role(s) of the user.

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The platform was also supposed to support the multi-domain (multi-companies / multi-location) of the freight forwarder.

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Email & WhatsApp based notifications were supposed to be provided as well

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A platform for freight forwarders
The work
The dashboard

A multi-domain / multi-location dashboard that provides the administrator to view all the shipment bookings and filter the same to narrow down the search. When the customer logs into the system, the option to select the customer is not shown.

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The dashboard

A multi-domain / multi-location dashboard that provides the administrator to view all the shipment bookings and filter the same to narrow down the search. When the customer logs into the system, the option to select the customer is not shown.

Shipment Details

This screen provides each and every detail of the shipment including the tracking information. Most importantly, the user interface gets dynamically generated. The layout automatically gets adjusted; labels and values are displayed based on shipment/job - type (FCL | LCL | AIR | Transport | Custom Clearance | Service Job)

Invoices & Documents

Invoices & Documents

Statement of Accounts

Statement of Accounts

User & Roles Management

A powerful user management system with options to give / revoke rights to the users, based on access rights defined for the roles.

Notifications

The in-app notifications provide end-to-end logs. This is over and above the notifications that are sent via email and WhatsApp.

The OTM API configuration

We built a framework that dynamically invokes the API based on the configuration done in such JSON files. Over and above the API URLs, it has the details of each and every field that can further be transformed based on SpEL (Spring Expression Language)

The Solution

OTM provides HATEOAS based APIs. We wrote a custom framework that picks up the API configuration from a JSON config file. The fields to be picked up from the response, the interval at which the APIs should be invoked to sync the data, and auto-invocation of related APIs, the SPEL based transformations are all the part of his JSON config file. Any new field needed from OTM ? just add it to the config file.

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The architecture of this platform is completely micro-services oriented. Each service runs in its own JVM. There are 7+ services that sits on top of spring cloud framework with Spring Cloud Gateway, Eureka for discovery and lot more.  The architecture is such that each service is completely independent of other services. No one service makes a call to another service. The entire communication happens via Kafka using PUB-SUB model. In quite a few cases, we have used ReplyingKafkaTemplate too.

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The data is modeled in line with NoSQL principles and sits on ATLAS MongoDB. Each micro-service has its own database in the cluster

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The messaging backbone is Kafka which makes sure that the Platform is completely agnostic of OTM. We can integrate this platform with any other ERP like Blue Yonder, or SAP ... just to name a few

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We have implemented document management with the S3 service from AWS. The files are stored and read from S3 via services.

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A custom oAuth 2.0 based authorization and authentication system is built by us on top of spring security with MongoDB as the database for user repository; passwords are encrypted. A common library that is used by most of the services uses a SecurityContext pattern which dynamically provides the logged in User information based on the token in the header of the request. Annotations like @PreAuthorize along with roles are used in order to further secure the APIs.

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A special service does the job of consuming messages from Kafka and triggering notifications via email & WhatsApp

STATS
16%
user insights, research, business strategy and decades of design leadership, we’ve evolved the digital brand
9%
user insights, research, business strategy and decades of design leadership, we’ve evolved the digital brand
440%
user insights, research, business strategy and decades of design leadership, we’ve evolved the digital brand