Home / Case Studies / International Package Shipping – from the US to Europe and the Philippines

Ship Globally for Less with International Package Shipping

Global logistics company uses deferred shipping and a sleek app to keep costs low for people sending packages from the U.S. to loved ones in Europe and the Philippines.

Background

Most global logistics companies focus on fast shipping. Of course, on-demand shipping is expensive, unsustainable and out of reach for many. International Package Shipping, has flipped the script. They’ve capitalized on shipping things slowly, relying on ocean freight and deferred shipping to keep costs low for their customers. The company cooperates with over 700 authorized shipping outlets to collect and send packages from the U.S. to countries in Europe and the Philippines.

Applandeo helped IPS implement modular systems so they could quickly expand to new countries. Our team took the existing system, updated the architecture and redesigned and created new code libraries to handle expanded business models.

The improved functionality included:

Package tracking
Package pricing, including standard and dimensional weight pricing
Shipping agent management
Global address validation

Name

International Package Shipping

From

The United States

Challenge Overview

International Package Shipping was looking for a team that could become an integral part of their company to enable them to scale its operations. It included optimizing systems and code to handle new operational models for growth initiatives and staying ahead of the competition. We were also responsible for maintaining the systems and code, and keeping detailed documentation. The team needed to include:

Project management to define tasks and workflows
DevOps to design and maintain a new and improved platform
Application development to refactor existing code, offer ideas on new technology and create extensible code to handle unique growth opportunities
Detailed documentation

Several of the business objectives we set out to solve and workflows we needed to optimize fell into three main areas:

Reduce time spent on system bugs
Enable quick, seamless updates to pricing, insurance coverage, and customs charges
Create a modular system to handle expansion into new countries with unique import/export formalities

Detailed Solution

Time is one of the critical factors of successful project management. In under a week, we assembled a team with a Senior PHP developer, a project manager and a DevOps engineer to take ownership of the project and begin dividing the project into phases.

Reducing resources spent on system bugs was one of the key goals of the project. We created new AWS server instances (both EC2 and RDS) with appropriate specifications for the application demands to address that one.

Addressing the need to add flexibility to pricing, insurance and customs charges, we incorporates refactoring libraries that handled package definitions, pricing, and customs requirements by country

We also redesigned user management, country and city validation, package tracking and cloud printing for shipping labels and customs documentation.

Another step was to create a modular system that handles expansion into new countries with varying operational models. We addressed it by redeveloping the agent management system, developing a new warehouse system for defining new U.S. and foreign warehouses and other distribution channels.

Technology stack:

Engine – custom PHP and JS framework
PHP 7.2
jQuery
twig
PostgreSQL 11.8
Apache 2.4
AWS EC2 Ubuntu and RDS

Main tools and solutions:

PhpStorm
AWS Management Console
pgAdmin
SaltStack
Docker

The Client’s opinion

Dan Ventura International Package Shipping CIO

Applandeo has made a significant impact on our business, enabling us to grow and meet the demands of our clients and partners.

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Hi, I’m Marcin, COO of Applandeo

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