Pelham Services
THE PROJECT SCOPE
Pelham Services came into being with an idea to provide exceptional cargo consolidation services for its global customers. Today, they have an enviable position in the market which is the outcome of many years of hard work and dedicated services for their clients. Pelham Services currently owns almost half a million square feet of warehouse space; 80% of the products or items stored are on the move in one way or another at any given time and many of their shipments comprise 50 containers or more.
Pelham has successfully expanded its services to Central and South America, the Caribbean as well as important destinations in Europe and Asia. Therefore, the details of their processes and each shipment need to be accurate because a minor mistake can be very damaging and expensive.
Prior to talking with us, Pelham was using outdated software that was not able to deliver the type of results they needed. As their business grew, they faced a couple of growing pains within their logistics system. As professionals committed to excellence they chose Iblesoft to develop a new integrated system. Our ASP.NET developers focused in on this project with outmost professionalism and dedication to make it a success.
THE DEVELOPMENT
They built a system that allowed the creation of dynamic views for the 5 main roles.
- Super Admin – the super administrator with full control over the system
- Admin – the admin has full control over their assigned branch or modules
- Warehouse worker – has access to warehouse related modules
- Picker – responsible for all pickup related activities
- Packer – responsible for repacking and consolidation
Also, alongside the roles, our developers integrated some key features.
- It can ship items through Ground, Air or Ocean
- Admins can create custom rates according to the type of customer (For ex: VIP, Regular and Portal)
- Creation of quick quotes, pickup & warehouse receipts and its labels
- Multiple warehouse receipts can be consolidated into one house waybill of the same type of shipment, customer and destination branch
- Associate or disassociate the warehouse receipts from the house waybill
- Consolidate multiple house waybills into one master waybill of the same type of shipment and destination branch
- Associate or dissociate the warehouse receipts from Master waybill
- Online tracking for Portal customers
- Online creation of quotations & pickup orders
The system also allows the user to login from a web browser eliminating the hassle of installing several components in the system and the admins can create roles for their employees in the system. This way the system checks the privileges assigned to a specific role as a way to control data access and manage specific tasks.
THE CHALLENGE
Although this kind of system was developed to be manageable, scalable and flexible it was custom made. Every development company faces some challenges with customization.
Some of the challenges we faced to build a system like this were:
- Understanding the overall business of the P.O. Box and Freight Forwarding from top to bottom
- Assuming the different process models according to roles and allowing them to be customized through the proprietary “Rule Based Framework”
- Understanding their shipment processes
- Creating an optimal user experience with a smooth work flow for easy training
Regardless, our .NET development team did a great job in meeting every requirement and overcoming the challenges. Through our success, Pelham Services is now able to maintain its steady growth with a system to go along with it.