Cost Estimation of E-Shipping Web Portal

The client is one of the world’s largest logistics service providers. They are a fully integrated supply chain service provider, the group is trying to expand their digital capabilities into internal operations as well. The project is to develop an E-Shipping platform for internal users. This platform will be engineered to extract details submitted by shippers. This will require development of a web-based portal for shippers and the admin user.

How we developed an Enterprise-grade application?

Enterprise grade security
All the components used within the platform are proven enterprise-grade
solutions and individual components will be developed with enterprise-grade
security in mind.

Following are the key points considered now :

• All the application infrastructure(app servers, db etc) will be within private VPS and access control restricted via platforms access privileges.
• All communications will be via https.
• If required API gateways can be used for additional fine grained controls.
• In addition, penetration testing can be performed by an internal QA team or we can engage 3rd party vendors for certifications if any required.

Highly scalable
The application out of the box is horizontally scalable. With minimal to no
usage disruption the platform can horizontally scale.

Highly decoupled architecture
The highly decoupled nature of the application allows easy switching of
products without major rewriting.

Minimum Platform dependency
It is very important to reduce the platform dependency, so as to allow easy
portability to any could of on-premise infrastructure in the future.

Future proof
We have designed the platform keeping in mind the future roadmap
and user requirements.

Open Source
All of the products/services used in the platform are either open source or pay as you go. This will minimize the running cost and maintenance of the platform.

For making the shipping experience cost-effective, flexible, connected, and efficient client needed a complete platform which could solve the following cases:-

• Registration for shippers
• SI Validation Dashboard including filters and to Download Report
• Overdue Dashboard including filters and to Download Report
• SI Submission page
• Manage Queries, Users, Rules Listing & Editing and Type of Tasks
• View Validated document
• OCR Extraction & Validation
• EDI Excel parsing

By analyzing the requirements of the client, Team Perfomatix was able to consolidate a system for this online shipping platform. The portal connects the shippers to the logistic operators. This helps in a seamless logistics process and enables fast report generation without any hassle.

The client wanted a web platform that helps operators to contact shippers and enable better communication between these two stakeholders in the shipping process. 

• This portal should be able to verify, validate and convert documents to simplified reports for users. 
• The shippers should be able to enter information and the operators can access them. 
• Different filters should be enabled for  Filter by Reference Number, Status, Country, Time and Location of office.

After analyzing the requirements from the customer for the application, Team Perfomatix came up with a high-level functionality E-Shipping platform. 

The user roles as per the requirements are as follows:

• Internal Operator
• Shipper
• Admin

The complete solution for making shipping simple and efficient, was built with the following components:-

• Web application for  Operator
• Web application for Shipper
• Web application for Admin

Features of  Web Application of Operator

• SI Validation Dashboard
• Upload document
• Remarks/Queries dashboard
• Trigger Email Notifications
• Overdue management
• Filters by country origin, Shipper name, Day & Week and Reference number
• Download Reports
• Run RPA bot with preset steps to update the SI details
• Output XML via FTP (same format as the input to the system)
• Output standard excel in downloadable format

Features of Web Application for Shipper

• View SI details in the defined interface
• View remarks shared by user
• Respond to queries and submit

Features of Web Application for Admin

• Ability of the admin user to login 
• Manage Users
• Manage and upload Rules

Technology Selection Criteria

Angular

Angular is an efficient front end framework with a simple and improved design architecture, declarative user interface, lesser and parallel development timeline, advanced state management and improved server performance.

JAVA Spring

Spring is a powerful lightweight complete and modular application development framework used for creating Enterprise applications in Java. Spring has a long and proven performance history along with a rich open source community backing it. Migration to microservices with minimal overhead is another key factor behind the selection of Spring framework to power web services.

Oracle Database

The Oracle Database 12c is a high-performance, enterprise-class database. … According to Oracle, this is “the first database designed for the cloud.” Oracle Database 12c also introduces 500 new features to the database, most notably pluggable databases and multitenant architecture.