Case Study: Handling Your Logistics
Would you trust just anyone to
coordinate your mission-critical operations?
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A few years ago, we here at larrryroof.com were approached by a major shipping company to help
them with some logistical issues that they had at their air hub. They needed to track packages as
they passed through their hub quickly, flawlessly, and efficiently.
Now for those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to step inside and see the inter-workings of
a shipping company’s air hub during what I would describe as their “rush hour”, it is a sight to
be seen. Within a matter of a few hours in the middle of the night, a whole fleet of cargo planes
arrive from various parts of the country, these planes are quickly unloaded, all of their
contents sorted and routed to the appropriate outbound planes, where they are loaded and whisked
away a few short hours later. This happens every night, night after night.
Where larryroof.com came in was to provide a system that scanned every package as it passed
through, recording what container each package went in, and what plane the container was loaded
onto. All of this happened in a wireless environment, realtime, with fail-over support for
situations where devices were outside of wireless coverage.
We started by visiting the client’s air hub in the middle of the night, during their “rush hour”
to see how their business worked. We took along video cameras so that we could capture details of
the operation for later review with our complete design team. We watch every part of their
operation. We asked lots of questions of everyone involved.
Next, we took all of this information back to our office, worked through it with our design team,
and then went back to our client, this time during the day to discuss our understanding about
their operations. We found out what we had right, what we had wrong and what we didn’t know yet.
All of this information was added to what we already had, rounding out the picture for us of how
their operations worked.
This is a perfect example of how larryroof.com is vastly different from all software companies
and most consulting firms. Rather than depending solely on the specs that the client sends, we
prefer to spend the time at the client’s site, watching how they work and questioning them on why
things are the way the are and how things work.
In the case of this solution, we developed a handheld-based system running on a wireless
infrastructure. The software on the devices was designed to update itself automatically, so that
it would always be up to date, a feature of products developed by larryroof.com. Devices would
continue to scan even if they could not get a wireless connection, but would then send all of
their buffered scans just as soon as they could reestablish a network connection, another
trademark of a larryroof.com product. The system has continued to run, night in, night out, year
after year - just the way we like it, and what you should expect nothing less then.
When you are looking for someone to build the systems that you are going to risk your business on
you need to call larryroof.com at 888-449-8720.
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