Advanced Freight Forwarding Platform Integration with Oracle Transport Management (OTM)

Freight Forwarder Platform

A platform for freight forwarders

CLIENT

Transform Technologies

INDUSTRY

Logistics

CORE TECHNOLOGIES

Angular

SpringBoot

OTM

AWS

Swagger

Spring-cloud-gateway

Kafka

Spring schedular

Spring cloud

Oracle

Jenkins

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

A customer portal for container business.

Many of the bookings that the customers did were repeat bookings. So a copy booking feature was imperative in order to save time on booking creation

One of the most complex features that were supposed to be implemented as shipping instructions. Shipping instructions are the details entered against each container with respect to the goods that are supposed to be shipped. An elegantly designed user interface to ease the laborious entry of data was extremely important.

Many of the customers of our client used to place blanket orders of several containers. Once the container was allocated, they used to then split the allocated containers across multiple bookings. It is a complex business process that was supposed to be meticulously designed and implemented

Tracking, booking statuses, filtering, customer onboarding and access rights - were the other significant features that were supposed to be part of the solution.

One of the architectural challenges was to integrate the application with their database-based ERP; a legacy ERP that was hosted on the private data centre. Yet another key ask was that - once the client moves its operations to OTM (Oracle Transport Management) the same customer portal must seamlessly integrate with OTM APIs.

The application was supposed to be highly-available, concurrent, reliable and fast and also, was supposed to adhere to the standards and principles of modern-day dev-ops.

A customer portal for container business.

THE WORK

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 dashboard

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

Invoice & Documents

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.

Notification

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

The dashboard

THE WORK

The OTM API configuration

The dashboard

Shipment Details

Invoice & Documents

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.

Notification

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

The dashboard

The Solution

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.

We architected the application such that it could be deployed as a monolith as well as micro-services.

Our ux-design partner provided elegant design for split and copy booking. We designed & implemented the backend logic that worked like a charm

We wrote sophisticated queries to reduce round-trip to the ERP database thereby enhancing the performance by leaps and bounds.

We architected and implemented a custom oAuth2.0 based authentication & authorization mechanism

The application was built iteratively and incrementally that facilitating early feedback.

We wrote CRON jobs to integrate with legacy ERP. The CRONs get the latest status updates from the ERP and also push the bookings from the customer portal to the ERP. The integration layer is designed in such a way that it can be switched to OTM with negligible effort.

The implementation of split bookings is the most interesting thing we did which created new bookings on the fly against a given blanket order

The deployment architecture included clustering of ec2 instances with load balancers in front.

The implementation of split bookings is the most interesting thing we did which created new bookings on the fly against a given blanket order

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