Prospere logistics warehouse management system
Client
A logistics company in Estonia who is in partnership with a Kazakhstan mining company. The products are distributed and delivered through Estonia. The logistics company is closely tied to the mining company to offer fluent and effective delivery to the clients. The mining company follows and keeps track of the product movements, and arising cash flows. Until recently the stakeholders used standard apps to document the product flows. As their needs were very specific they could not find a suitable warehouse management software on the market. They needed a custom solution built exactly for their needs, something that allows you to get info from the system fast and have it all in one database.
Goal
The goal was to build a tool for three stakeholders:
- Employees in Estonian logistics company – Warehouse workers use the system to register and keep track of the shipments. What has been sent out from the mining company, what is in stock, what has been sent out to the client.
- Management in the Estonian logistics company. Get an overview of the product flows and keep track of the logistics costs.
- Kazakhstan mining company and investors. Get an overview and statistics of the business. For example, the system would have been able to filter profitability of the product, prospect, package, etc. This would make it easier to make better decisions in the future.
What we did
From Pineparks perspective we needed to build a reliable, lean and secure system. We didn’t prepare a detailed brief and wireframe, as there were many moving parts and there was no way to have a linear task. Therefore, we decided to divide the project into different stages and interacted with the client for feedback in every step. We used the Agile methodology. Needless to say, we always had a big picture on the blackboard.
The system was built on Laravel. Supporting technologies were JavaScript (jQuery), Bootstrap, MySQL, GIT.
Some of the functionalities we associated to the system in order to have good UX and effectiveness of the work process included:
- Autocomplete to see the stock when compiling a new shipment.
- Crucial product data is that visible and searchable throughout the system.
- As the system deals with many specific data fields, we decided to use a filtered search system only.
Testing was a demanding stage in the project. The product is still in Beta.
Overall, we managed to build a custom made warehouse system in 5 months. The project was set up based on regular feedback from the client which helped to model a working product from prototype. The project is continuing with small tasks to polish and advance the system to the greater demands.
