Success Story High Tech

Global Shipping Solutions Provider Elevates Service Levels in the Cloud

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This shipping company offers international delivery solutions through strategically located processing centers throughout the U.S. By combining technology and global logistics expertise, the company optimizes delivery workflows, enhances visibility, and simplifies international shipping complexity for its customers.

Its worldwide network, technology-backed support model and extensive knowledge of international shipping requirements provide a seamless experience with delivery reliability, accuracy and consistency.Part of this company’s success is dependent on its ability to integrate its logistics platform with 3rd party delivery vendors all over the world. This impacts its ability to onboard those vendors, add new services, and manage customer shipping costs. As it outgrew its existing technology services vendor, this company turned to Apexon to help map out its digital path forward.

25 years of experience in international shipping and logistics
Spinoff from R.R. Donnelly in 2020
Four strategically located logistics centers in the US

The customer journey

2019

2020

2021

2022

2019

Start of engagement

2020

Stabilization of existing logistics platform, development partner for new services
Spinoff from R.R. Donnelly, additional services

2021

Migration to Azure

2022

Continued application development partner

the Results

Key Outcomes

At the close of the project, Apexon was able to deliver the following features and upgrades to the customer’s hiring and talent processing systems:

Increased uptime
for mission
criticaL applications

Reduced
operational
downtime

Increased
throughput of
warehouse operations

Expanded services
for customers

Enhanced data
insights & reporting

The challenge

Finding the Right Digital Partner to Keep Pace with Market Dynamics

This company was formerly part of R.R. Donnelly’s Global Logistics division. And prior to 2019 it was working with another technology services vendor for development. As the company grew, this technology services vendor was struggling to keep pace, causing critical time-to-market delays for new services, hampering system maintenance and scalability, impacting service levels, and slowing the growth of the business.

At the time, Apexon was working with other groups within R.R. Donnelly Global Logistics and had a very strong track record for digital innovation, quality, and delivery. That led the company’s team to engage Apexon to help define a path forward with two primary objectives:

Enable to business to move more quickly by eliminating production, maintenance and scalability issues

Provide the ability to easily add new services and capabilities that would continue to differentiate its service offering and enable expansion into new delivery markets around the world

This company partners with many different vendors in different countries around the world. Each new vendor requires a new integration. This had become very difficult with its existing platform. New integrations would break existing features and slow partner and customer onboarding. Addressing this challenge was key to the company’s success.

The ability to add new services like least-cost routing, warehouse automation, parcel tracking, and automated reporting and analytics were also important to help the company maintain and extend its leadership position.

At the time, the company’s platform was running on-premise on legacy infrastructure. This added to the challenges and complexity of 3rd party vendor integrations, the addition of new services and functionality, and ongoing system maintenance and scalability.

The Solution

A Flexible Cloud-Based Platform to Accelerate Development & Enhance Service Levels

Apexon’s engagement with the company was centered on digital engineering and data & analytics. Our approach involved an onsite/offshore delivery model with a dedicated Scrum Master working closely with the client. The team was organized into three groups focused on the company’s primary goals:

Digital Engineering

Making the existing platform more stable and preventing ongoing maintenance and operation problems

Application Development

Delivering new features and developments to enhance service levels

Infrastructure

Enhance the scalability and performance of the platform with a focus on infrastructure

The first step was to stabilize the company’s existing platform. Apexon initiated a new DevOps process to insert quality engineering earlier in the development process. This in combination with Apexon’s technical expertise, brought immediate improvements to platform performance and cycle time for system updates and maintenance.

Next Apexon helped the company add least-cost routing and package tracking capabilities to the platform. These were important features that were in high demand from customers. Both of these capabilities involved complex integrations with all of its third-party providers.

In late 2020, this company was spun off from R.R. Donnelly as a separate business. This created the need to re-think its IT infrastructure and the opportunity to optimize it for its business going forward. With Apexon’s guidance, the decision was made to move the the company’s logistics platform to Azure Cloud. This offered a number of important benefits – reduced CapEx and maintenance costs, increased speed and flexibility in adding new features, streamlined integration with new shipping partners around the world, and enhanced data reporting capabilities.

Apexon handled the migration of all existing applications to Azure including its vendor integration framework. It also immediately shifted all new development work to Azure. This effort included selecting the right supporting infrastructure and database.

Apexon also continued to assist in new feature development and expansion:

Parcel management, sorting and routing in warehouses were critical capabilities for the company and they required enormous manual effort. Apexon developed software to automate warehouse conveyor belt functions to speed up labeling, and automate existing sorting capabilities

In advance of the company opening its new logistics facility in Miami in June 2022, Apexon was behind the scenes, making sure it was online and ready to go into full production

Apexon continues today as a development partner of this company– making continuous improvements to its Azure-based logistics platform, adding new service features, and ensuring easy onboarding of new partners.

Outcomes

The results to date for this company have been significant:

Incorporation of a best practice Agile software development model across the business

A streamlined IT department due to a more stable platform and simpler partner integrations

Stabilized applications to increase uptime

Automation of previously manual parcel shipment processes in warehouses

Enhanced data insights and reporting

Launched mission critical applications increasing organizational throughput

Enabled better foresight and IT investment

Began data engineering and reporting to lay foundation for future expansion

Migrated on-premise infrastructure to Azure cloud – reducing CapEx and maintenance costs, increasing speed and flexibility in adding new features, and streamlining integration with new shipping partners around the world, and enhancing data reporting capabilities

Success Story High Tech Global Shipping Solutions Provider Elevates Service Levels in the Cloud