Creating the digital freight forwarder
CLIENT
A large expediting company
Drives various freight operations in 151 world countries.
CHALLENGE
The main objective of an expediting company is to create a delivery route that will suit the customer in terms of timeframes and pricing. Companies usually use multimodal logistics for that and employ two or more means of transportation — automotive, railroad, maritime, or avian.
How companies organize multimodal deliveries
Expeditor calls every freight carrier known to be operating in the certain direction, selects the best price, creates a complete chain of delivery and proceeds to send the delivery quote to the expeditor’s customer. Collection and analysis of the offers can take significant amounts of time, and the difference in freight carriers’ bids can reach 30%.
30%
is the possible price difference for a same-locations delivery between the logistics operators.
Most popular issues in the field
The client needed to:
SOLUTION
Reksoft specialists have faced these issues:
- Lack of rules and standards in offers’ representation. Every freight carrier just send a custom-created .xls file
- Differences in geographical names. Some of the carriers viewed Richmond as a separate location from London, for example.
The first thing that our experts have done was to unify the multitude of offers and geographical issues to a certain standard. The development was using Agile methods, moving in bi-weekly iterations.
Then we have developed a system for calculating the services prices of expediting companies and freight carriers. The product has become the connecting link between the customer and service providers. It allowed the user to do a preliminary calculation and pick the optimal options.
MongoDB has been chosen as a data management platform. This is a document-oriented NoSQL database that supports geographical requests, full-text searches in 15 languages and hierarchical data structure. It is horizontally scaled and can be used as file storage with load balance and data replication.
ReactJS was picked as a front-end framework. It enables quick and dynamic front-end changes for shiting requirements and functional changes.
OUTCOMES
The project is able to handle complex optimization and algorithmic objectives. The system that we’ve developed compares hundreds of routes and prices in seconds and proposes the optimal ones.
At the moment, there are millions of offers for various deliveries in the system. 50+ global companies enter their offers directly to the system, the online calculation feature is used for deliveries between China, Vietnam, USA, India, EU and Russia. The system’s geography is constantly expanding.
How will the service be monetized? The expeditor’s reward is put into each delivery ordered through the service. Also, the solution can be shipped as a SaaS for other expeditors and industrial enterprises – as a website widget or a white label solution.
50 companies
have entered their offers to the system.
Vitaly Grekov
CEO of Aistlog, a transportation and expediting company
“Reksoft specialists have successfully tackled complex algorithmic and optimization objectives. We are happy to continue our cooperation because the number of goals will be even more from now on. There will be more users and more data in the system, which will be changed as well. We are sure that together with Reksoft we can maintain steady platform growth, offer the rapid development tools while keeping the bar for high quality and reliability.”