Global Logistics and Inventory Management

Client

Our client 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, our client has successfully created differentiated value added services for industry verticals including: biopharmaceutical,
yacht transport, military, and government logistics.

Our client also engaged us to assist it’s sister firm – 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.

Business Challenge

Having experienced rapid growth and international expansion over two decades, our client 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

Solution & Benefits

DonRiver 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

To meet these requirements, DonRiver 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 was able to significantly cut the time and cost to develop the solution. At the same time we leveraged our in-house 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 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.