Objective
ALG Worldwide Logistics, a leading logistics management company providing a comprehensive suite of management and related services to over 20,000 clients worldwide, sought to improve its customer experience by combining multiple client portals into a unified, robust web application to reduce the steps and the number of platforms that its customers needed to visit in order to manage their accounts.
Scope
Develop a web application that would:
- Communicate with ALG’s internal systems to retrieve and manipulate customer information.
- Visualize shipment data such as total spend, total volume, and transactions by state.
- Allow users to run comprehensive reports to retrieve their account summaries, payment histories, and open invoices.
- Enable users to submit new shipments.
- Allow customers to easily and quickly track shipments.
- Integrate the 7LFreight API so that users can quote instantly before submitting a new shipment.
Process
- The Discovery Phase included:
- Analyzing the existing customer portals:
- ALG Logic Client Center
- ALG Online – 3PL System
- ALG TMS Client Center
- ALG Print Media Client Center
- Print & Mailing Solutions Client Center
- Data & database structuring
- User flows
- Data flows
- Developing interactive wireframes, emulating user flows
- Analyzing the existing customer portals:
- The Design Phase included:
- Working directly with ALG’s Vice President of Information, Security, & Technology in creating Visual Designs for all front-end desktop pages.
- The Development Phase of the application has been ongoing for nearly two years and continues to be worked on in sprints to develop new functionalities.
- Each deployment cycle included extensive testing on a staging environment, with a focus on security and quality assurance.
Tech Stack
- Backend: Laravel, PHP
- Frontend: Vue, JavaScript, HTML, CSS
- Hosting: Digital Ocean & Windows IIS
- Tools: Visual Studio Code, Git/GitHub, Sequel Pro, Insomnia, Laravel Forge
Analysis
- The ALG Interface allows ALG’s customers to manage all aspects of their accounts in one place, including quoting, ordering, tracking, and billing. This process was previously managed by customers in five different portals. This has highly improved the user experience of ALG’s customers and has improved the efficiency of ALG’s internal processes and account management.
Future/ Current Relationship
- BuildThis continues to develop new functionality for the ALG Interface on an ongoing basis and maintains all of ALG’s applications and its corporate website.
