Company Profile

Evans Delivery Company, a leading trucking company with headquarters in Pottsville, PA, offers logistics and billing services to over 50 satellite terminals and offices nationwide.

Challenge

For its day to day business operations and logistics management, Evans uses software systems specifically designed for the transportation industry. Their business processes include systems for Accounting, Billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Warehouse Management (WMS). Evans had their business rules encapsulated very well and had a stable business layer in place. The challenge now was to develop a User Interface to these systems that was effective and efficient. The interface should provide easy navigation of workflow processes and consistent reporting. It should also be able to integrate with the Billing System, which was written in COBOL.

The front end was a critical component for Evans since all their satellite offices would be using it to communicate with their business systems. Evans approached us for a solution that fit their business needs.

Solution

We developed an extranet for Evans using latest technologies such as ASP.NET for User Interface and XML Web Services for communication. Our solution allows communication with EVANS’ business systems through a single centralized application. The front end provides a graphical interface and allows easy navigation between screens. Billing and accounting templates are provided that allow for easy recall of common accounting data. To support a consistent format for reporting, all reports can be dynamically generated in PDF format. The application also supports several other features such as administrative functions for multiple locations, a security model for creating user accounts, search capability to look up existing bills, customer account creation etc.

Benefits

Since deploying the new extranet, Evans has significantly improved productivity, especially in the area of entering new bills and searching old bills. In addition, they are currently fielding significantly fewer support-related complaints, especially regarding printing of bills and other accounting documents. They have also been able to reduce the time it takes to train new terminal and office personnel, reducing training from multiple-day sessions to a mere two hours. Our solution has facilitated Evans in its growth to more than double while keeping its staffing needs low.

Additional Benefits:

• Does not require the purchase of client application software
• Insures greater productivity by grouping related functions together
• Enables users to work from different locations using their existing Internet connections

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