The business challenge

The beneficiary of the project was a leading provider in the Supply Chain Industry (Warehousing, Logistics, Transportation, Global Forwarding) with more than 87000 employees in 33 countries.
Their objective was to built a Web Portal for fresh-goods warehouses owned by one of the biggest supermarket chains in the Netherlands.
Our solution
We have developed an integrated solution to help the beneficiary in his day to day activities. The scope of the Portal is to manage the schedule of incoming goods (delivered by suppliers) and the schedule of outgoing goods (delivered to other warehouses or directly to stores). Different parts of the application are available depending on the role of the logged in user.
- The Suppliers and Customer can view and manage the stock they currently hold in the warehouse.
- The Transporter is responsible with the planning of the outgoing transports which have to obey many complex business rules related to the capacity of the warehouse.
- The Carriers’ main task is to plan appointments for bringing goods into the warehouse.
- The Superadmin is responsible for creating new users and organizations in the system.

Team setup
We embrace Agile methodologies in most of our projects. Many times it is our customers and partners who ask us to use Agile methodologies (Scrum, Kanban) from the inception of the project. When the choice is left to our engineers, we carefully analyze the project specifics, and we propose a project management methodology based on Scrum or Kanban which best fits the specific project needs and context.
We had a core project team of 5 people, both front end and backend developers, that were working in close collaboration with our customer team.
As in all of our projects, we have worked in an agile mode, using specific Agile methodologies: daily scrum meetings with sprints and demo release every two weeks.
Architecture & Technologies
Architecture
The backend of the portal is developed in Java8. It communicates through REST calls with the front-end of the portal. Also, it communicates through SOAP calls with an external web service which holds most of the data.
The frontend is a Single Page Application developed using Angular 1.3. Other building blocks : Node js/npm, Browserify, SASS, Gulp.
Technologies
- Java 8
- Play 2 Java framework
- Jackson
- Apache CXF
- Guice
- Guice-Persist
- JPA
- PostgreSQL
- JUnit
- Mockito