Freight Brokerage Company Sees a 140% Reduction in AWS Bills

Challenge

Since their establishment 20+ years ago, FreightCenter has seen the transportation industry advance light years. With that amount of experience, they know more about moving freight and shipping goods from point A to point B than just about anyone. However, the Transportation Management System (TMS) they were using needed a critical upgrade so that they could provide their customers with better services and continue daily operations.

Digging into the core of FreightCenter’s code base, we found that their previous software vendor, who spent over two years working on the TMS project, had left more than a few stones unturned. Fortunately, the team at KITRUM was able to pick up the slack and ensure the two years of work would actually see the light of day.

Solution

FreightCenter’s previous vendor selected a PHP framework for the backend while rewriting the platform, which has its pros and cons. One of the downsides is the difficulty of connecting FreightCenter’s many moving parts using PHP, which resulted in multiple deployment failures. When FreightCenter came to us, we agreed to move forward with fixing and supporting the rewritten product, instead of coding the system from scratch again.

In addition to completing the TMS rework, we took it upon ourselves to integrate with FreightCenter’s CRM of choice, Hubspot, to help them maximize their relationship-based shipping solutions. HubSpot’s API was a hot mess to deal with (at the time), but eventually, we integrated the two systems to ensure customer and shipping data is synced between them in real-time.

During the development phase, we ran into a few pitfalls with Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud configurations. Namely, AWS was set up by the previous vendor in such a way that unnecessary logs were constantly being saved, costing FreightCenter thousands of dollars per month and causing critical system slowdowns. After several iterations, we optimized the AWS infrastructure and setup, reducing costs by 140%.

In 4.5 months, we’re able to:

• Finish developing the custom TMS
• Migrate customer and shipping data to the new TMS
• Optimize AWS configurations
• Create a CI/CD pipeline to roll out features and hotfixes
• Guarantee data integrity

We also launched new features like:

• Improved CRM dashboard analytics
• Improved reporting tools
• Redesigned customer dashboard
• Additional accounting and bookkeeping tools
• Enhanced security

Impact

FreightCenter’s backbone, their dedicated experts who provide customers with the help and guidance they need, can now do their job better thanks to KITRUM. Our efforts have future-proofed the company for years to come, and their award-winning 3PL service will continue delivering goods to happy customers worldwide.

Next Chapter

FreightCenter is currently on features to improve the customer experience. They include automating invoice payments and document generation, adding additional shipping services, better ways to inform customers on their shipment statuses, and building a mobile app.

Other efforts are focused on improving the TMS experience for both the sales and accounting teams.

To wind up about the project