When the first merchants started reaping the benefits of using the sea to move goods more quickly and more cost-effectively in the 3rd century BC, shipping became the backbone of global trade, and it has been growing ever since.
Despite all the advancements in how the goods are transported, from containerisation in 1956 and more recently adding refrigeration, meaning ships can carry fresh produce previously only handled by airfreight, the effort it takes to organise moving goods from their place of manufacture to their place of sale remains incredibly disparate and complex.
A key player in the global transport and logistics industry wanted to bring the practices of an agile business and combine it with the user-centric approach of application design to create a more frictionless experience for their customers.
To do this, they needed to strengthen their customer facing touchpoints by upgrading their legacy architecture to enable new services. Endava was engaged by the business to assess their legacy estate and provided them with a roadmap that would allow them to achieve their goal by working together with other service providers and their IT teams.
Endava helped the team achieve agility within their existing infrastructure while replacing a key customer portal. Like many legacy software systems, the portal was built on a complex, monolithic architecture that is difficult to upgrade and improve, but that doesn't mean you can just switch it off.
Digitising this complicated legacy estate required a strong architectural strategy, a customer-experience focus and great engineering execution. Thanks to the 'do with' attitude of Endava and the excellent collaboration between the various teams, today the portal provides customers with a more joined-up, frictionless user-experience and the ability to book the services they need more quickly and efficiently than before, at any time of the day or night.
While offering a better service today was always mission critical, this ambitious business is not satisfied with merely meeting expectations - they want to exceed them. They are focused on enabling future technology like IOT and Blockchain sooner rather than later. These technologies are poised to make big changes to transport, logistics and supply chain management, and the business intends to lead the charge. Having a platform that is ready to take on this future tech and connect disparate systems to provide an end-to-end service is the first and most crucial step, and it is one that has already been taken.