We have worked with this Logistics company for 12 years plus, and have seen many changes over the years. The system that we originally started out developing for our Client was for use by a few people in the United Kingdom. It is now a completely different system that is used by all their business units worldwide.

The Logistics Database System (LDS - name changed for confidentiality)

LDS is a desktop application used for business development (prospecting), customer relationship management and Business Intelligence (BI) analysis and reporting. This was commissioned by the second largest logistics company in the world. It uses web services to allow international use of the application to communicate with the database and maintain the application. This has been developed with our international logistics customer (HO in the Netherlands), and it is in use throughout 29 business units around the globe. We support this system continuously, and one of the features that aid this is the automatic error log emails that are sent to us if any problems occur. The 'Pipeline' report is sent automatically every 4 weeks to provide HO with a clear indication of current and future prospects. It is written in .NET 2.0, which has greatly improved the development times, and the processing makes use of the multi-processor clients and servers, that provide a large decrease in time taken. It needs to be seen to be appreciated, as it has components, written by us, that give it a unique view, be it dashboard or standard. All updates and data are supplied automatically from the desktop, and 'clever' code has been written to let the user carry on working in a screen whilst other 'tabs' update. This ensures that inactivity is, at worst, only a few seconds.

From an original Microsoft Access 2 system we wrote over 10 years ago, it has come a long way.

LDS was developed and migrated in only 3 months!

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