Customs clearance technology for air, ocean, rail and truck imports and exports
Success Cases
About this project
SmartBorder is a customs clearance Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for air, ocean, rail, and truck imports and exports, helping brokers, carriers, and importers to manage efficient and cost-effective entry into the U.S. The company has been providing the best compliance software solutions to give its clients a competitive edge.
- Industry: Computer Software, Logistics & Supply Chain.
- Headquarters: Buffalo, NY.
- Founded: 2001.
- Website: smartborder.com
- Service provided: Staff Augmentation; Product Development; UX/UI Design.
Challenge
SmartBorder’s goals were to increase its quality and speed of software development in order to fulfill its customers' changing needs in a very dynamic industry.
The Logistics & Supply Chain industry is subject to constant regulation changes by governments. A myriad of stand-alone systems that addressed those changes co-existed in the same space, making it hard for SmartBorder’s customers to seamlessly work with them.
In terms of efficiency, the adaptation process to those systems came at a great cost for SmartBorder’s customers, since their employees had to spend lots of time learning how to properly use them.
They were lacking the bandwidth to cope with the combined challenges of maintaining its older assets and keeping up with an increasing customer demand for updated systems.
Solution
We designed and developed a completely new Logistics & Supply Chain Software as a Service (SaaS) using the latest Microsoft and Angular technologies. Our team merged several stand-alone systems into a single, technologically up-to-date web platform, while preserving legacy systems in the process.
While working on the back-end of the solution, our team noticed that many patterns were repeated between systems. With this in mind, our team created a procedure to use the data in each new project. By also creating our own back-end code generator, production times reduced from 4 days to 10 minutes, enhancing efficiency.
Our UI/UX Design team contributed to the front-end design of the solution, keeping a customer-centric approach so that any user could easily use and understand the software.
As a result, SmartBorder is able to offer a unified, straightforward and more intuitive solution for its customers, so they can easily manage their Logistics & Supply Chain operations, automate their back-office processing, staying flexible enough to adapt to ever changing industry demands.
100%
improvement in development speed
Operational risk reduction
through customer automation
95%
of customers migrated to the new system
Milestones
October 2016
Discovery phase started
We visited SmartBorder’s headquarters in Buffalo to start planning the work ahead and build a proof of concept.
February 2017
Project kick-off
We began developing the new front-end web platform solution from scratch using the latest technologies.
April 2018
Assisting with a wider spectrum of needs
We started contributing with front-end design, back-end code generation, and logistics commerce forms and rules. This reduced production times and boosted development speed by 99.8%.
April 2019
The new platform goes live
SmartBorder’s customers started migrating to the new application with high rates of conversion and satisfaction.
July 2019
New responsibilities were trusted to KAIZEN
Our team visited SmartBorder’s headquarters in Buffalo, embarking on new design suggestions and began helping a SmartBorder client with a vehicle import/export solution to Canada. This project called RIV, included the maintenance of virtual and physical import/export forms, verification of vehicle brands, and security mechanisms.
April 2020
Achieving objectives despite pandemic limitations
SmartBorder continued investing in the growth of the new platform. In order to provide greater robustness to the scope of the system, our software development team worked on front-end enhancements and redesigns, in addition to performing back-end maintenance services.
September 2021
LECT design starts
SmartBorder got a new client and along with it new special demands for features. Since they didn’t have the bandwidth to cope with those demands, our UI/UX Design team was trusted with the design from scratch of this new client subproject called LECT.
October 2021
LECT implementation started
Thanks to the positive feedback of the prototype designed by our UI/UX Design team, the LECT project went into production in less than one month.
March 2022
Kick-off new sub project: RIV 2.0
RIV was a functional system for importing vehicles from Canada to the United States. Smarborder needed to re-do the system from scratch with new front and back end technologies.
Testimonial
KAIZEN found a solution for everything I’ve thrown at them; they’ve never said they can’t do it. I’m really satisfied. I’ve been in this business for a long time. If I had this team 10 years ago, I’d be in a much different situation right now. I really like them. They offered skilled resources as well as compatible time zones that worked very well with our U.S. development team.
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