Enterprise level digital ecosystem for logistics management

Project duration

12 months

Industry

Logistics, Fintech

Our Client – A Fintech Giant

Our client, eCapital, is a corporation that helps small and mid-sized businesses with funding solutions. eCapital’s brand, Five Star, offers a suite of products that equip small & mid-size transportation businesses with the necessary tools for success.

One of the products in the suite is the Five Star Load Board. It is a shipping and logistics marketplace where both carriers and brokers can find, post, and factor truck loads. eCapital contacted us to upgrade its existing product with new features that make it easier for both drivers and freight brokers to manage their loads.

A Five Star Load Board
for the Logistics Industry

Specializations

1

Product
Owner
1

Project
Manager
3

Software
Engineers
1

QA
Engineer
1

Product
Designer

Services

Product Design
Product Development
Project Management
Quality Assurance

Components Built

Flawless Onboarding
Load Ingestion
Enterprise level search
User-friendly acquirement of loads
Bidding system
Cost-per-mile calculator
Factoring invoices
Lead Generation

Technologies

Solr
Stripe
BitBucket
DataDog
BugSnag
Kubernetes
AWS

The challenge

Our client faced several challenges. Some of them included:

Finding the appropriate partner for the technical solution – the client needed a partner with lots of experience building digital products in the industry and who could provide a full-fledged team for the entire process, from software planning to release management.
Generating leads – eCapital needed a new channel that would generate leads who would use their factoring services.
Creating an in-house product that can generate income and provide added value to existing eCapital customers.

Technology Solutions

Enterprise infrastructure

By using state-of-the-art technology solutions Agilno kept the high quality and reliability of the final product. We used AWS and Kubernetes, an open-source container orchestration system used for networking and building the infrastructure from scratch. It’s also used for deployment, scaling, and general application management.

Real-time search

Solr was used for enterprise-level searches. We had to design a system that can ingest millions of loads per day and show them in less than 2 seconds. Solr met the mark and helped us achieve the necessary performance we needed to deliver the best user experience.

GeoData for trucking

PC Miler was used for generating maps and optimizing them for truck lanes. Thanks to its features, users can calculate mileage, drive time, rates for lane analysis, and driver pay.

Continuous Deployment and Monitoring

We used a range of tools and processes for automation and continuous monitoring throughout the lifecycle of apps, from integration and testing phases to delivery and deployment.

Enterprise level digital ecosystem for logistics management

Project Flow

How we structured the team

The team consisted of a product owner, a project manager, two full-stack developers, a backend developer (also team lead), a QA engineer, and a product designer.

Project management

We started the collaboration by setting and picking the right tools, processes, and standards. We agreed on using Smartsheet to track high-level requirements and product and technology roadmap that aligns with other product teams within eCapital. We used Jira for tracking work in progress, team performance KPIs, and delivery. Confluence was used for all project, product, and engineering documentation. As a team, we agreed on using SCRUM as a methodology for development with daily standups, grooming, sprint planning, demos, and retrospectives. On top of SCRUM, we were working with the eCapital team on release management and product planning cycles that were outside of the scrum. Our project manager was working very closely with the eCapital change control management team to plan new releases and timelines.

Product management

For every feature that was prioritized for development, we would make sure the feature goes through a discovery process to see how it aligns with business and existing users, what is the marketing strategy behind it, and what is required to create it. The discovery process would get all the necessary details that we needed to schedule a feature for development.

Quality Assurance

We didn’t want to compromise on quality and that is why we created a quality plan that was a part of our project management plan. We focused a lot on tracking code reviews, variances and defects, test case executions, and bugs reported by the customer support team. Our definition of ready and done where important to set a standard for how tickets are written and closed. Engineering teams wrote unit and integration tests to increase our quality and confidence to ship features faster with fewer bugs.

Finance management

Scrum comes with its own challenges and one of them is finances. We used story points for planning the work, but we also created a way to segregate work into timesheets filed under CapEx and Opex, allowing the eCapital finance team to file our work properly. Our team worked very closely with the finance team on sizing new features and initiatives.