Project Synopsis
This UK retailer had a collection of lots of heterogeneous systems for tracking shipments from their online ecommerce website. Each of these system had awareness of the order shipment (Parcel) status, but they were not consistent with each other. Need of the hour was to define a system, which acted as a single source of truth and can be queried to determine the exact location and status of a parcel.
The developed platform was expected to have the following features:
- Maintain and track parcel status and location
- Maintain integrity of data and expose services to determine the current status of the parcel.
- Provide ability to onboard various agents and systems which can act as provider of parcel status information or consumer.
Rare Mile Solution
We worked with the client’s team to refine the ecosystem and remove duplicate storage of parcel tracking information. We also helped in architecture definition and implementation of the Parcel Tracking engine which held the information of the parcel. APIs were exposed to other systems which can query the engine to determine the exact status and location of a parcel.
We implemented the solution with the following features:
- Architecture assessment of the current system to remove duplicate and inconsistent data
- Design and implementation of the Parcel tracking engine.
Project Highlights
- The system was heterogeneous in nature and too many systems were holding and managing the same information, resulting in data inconsistency. The first step was to remove this duplication of data
- We designed and implemented a scalable and fault tolerant system to hold the key information of the parcel. Complexities arose due to multiple systems sending updates on a parcel location and status thereby making it difficult to maintain a clean state of the data.
- Interact with multiple systems which sends the information about a parcel’s information in its own format. The Parcel Tracking engine maintains and guides the mapping of information from various sources to a uniform and consistem format.
- Designed and developed a custom rules engine with complex algorithms to ensure data integrity of parcel information
