Shipping a container from Shanghai to Rotterdam involves about 30 different parties. Truckers, customs brokers, port authorities, shipping lines. If one link breaks, the whole chain stalls. TransGlobal needed a single pane of glass to see it all.
The Integration Nightmare
The hardest part of this project wasn't the UI; it was the data aggregation. We had to connect to legacy EDI systems from the 90s, modern REST APIs, and even scrape some carrier websites. We built a formatting layer that takes this chaotic stream of data and standardizes it into clear, actionable statuses: "At Port," "Customs Cleared," "Out for Delivery."
Exception Management
The system is designed around Management by Exception. If a shipment is on time, you don't hear about it. But if a container is held at customs for more than 4 hours, the operations team gets a Slack notification and a red alert on their dashboard. This allows a small team to manage thousands of active shipments efficiently.
