The client
Cavalier Logistics is an international freight forwarder based near Washington, D.C. Founded in 1986. It has grown to become a recognized name in the industry through a flexible approach which places emphasis on customized service. In an industry with
ever-increasing competition and ever-decreasing profit margins, Cavalier Logistics has successfully created differentiated value added services for industry verticals including: biopharmaceutical, yacht transport, military, and government logistics.
Cavalier Logistics also engaged us in a project for its daughter company Sotheby's – one of the nation’s leading fine art handling and logistics companies that caters exclusively to the world’s largest high end art galleries and auction houses.
The challenge
Having experienced rapid growth and international expansion over two decades, Cavalier Logistics faced the challenge of outgrowing their systems, much of which had been acquired over a decade ago and is largely obsolete today. The systems’ difficulty of use meant inefficient operations and steep learning curves for new staff, while operations remained choked by the sheer volume of transactions. These problems were compounded by the fact that the client had acquired multiple, disconnected platforms for different parts of the business through previous growth and expansion initiatives. These factors resulted in the following key
challenges:
• Manual data entry & re-keying of order and shipment information
• Complex user interfaces with terminal screens resulting in high costs of employee training
• Long service delivery intervals due to inefficient manual processes, and lack of automation
• Ineffective status tracking and inability to proactively act on orders enroute
• Expensive and slow to integrate with key business and trading partners
• Lack of business intelligence and reporting on sales, shipments, and operations
The solution
DonRiver-Azoft was engaged to develop a unified platform to handle all parts of the business and support the following:
• Manage a wide variety of activities and automate key business processes and internal operations
• Minimize manual intervention and thus increase operational capacity
• Provide a single consolidated location for all business data
• Yield a 360 degree view of the customer including leads, customer info, order status & history, etc.
• Eliminate re-keying and reduce data integrity issues
• Develop a simple to use system requiring little or no training, while remaining easy to maintain going forward
The outcome
To meet these requirements, DonRiver-Azoft chose to leverage the power and low cost of widely available open source software and build a scalable CRM and Order Management solution around it. By using open source rather than proprietary solutions, DonRiver-Azoft was able to significantly cut the time and cost to develop the solution. At the same time we leveraged our inhouse talent to develop shipping and logistics specialized modules that provide extended CRM functions, Order Management, Data Warehousing and Data Mining, Business Intelligence & Reporting, as well as end-to-end ERP functionality. With this new system, the client will be able to:
• Manage new and existing customers,
• Create, track and manage orders (as well as inventory),
• Manage its internal operations and workflow
• Decrease costs by reducing training and down time, while also increasing handling capacity as a result of increased automation
• Deploy a web-driven portal which can be accessed by any employee anytime, anywhere
Furthermore, by building the new system using industry-leading SOA practices and cutting-edge technologies like J2EE, BPEL, and WebServices we have ensured that it will remain scalable and customizable for many years to come. It is also noteworthy that DonRiver-Azoft assisted the client in moving its entire IT infrastructure to a 3rd party managed environment, guaranteeing virtually 100% uptime while lowering the final IT bill of the client. The new setup also gives the customer industry-recognized disaster recovery levels and truly makes performance issues a thing of the past.
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.
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.
