Bespoke mobile app has immediate impact 

For the customer’s large scale operations within Africa and South Africa, reports had to be done manually for each movement of cargo/containers through the warehouses. This included processes such as receiving of trucks and containers, packing cargo into containers, and dispatching the containers to the designated port or local destination within the country. The reports facilitate transactional data capturing and also generate photo evidence reports, which are shared with customers on request throughout the process of handling the cargo.

The mobile app was created to optimise the process of generating movement reports, providing customers with evidence of movements done with regard to their cargo, and also ensuring that evidence can be shared with the customer on movements of cargo and the state of the cargo throughout the supply chain. It has been highly successful in this regard. It eradicates the reliance on manual processes, guiding users through each step of the procedure from beginning to end. Generating movement reports in PDF form now requires far less human effort than was previously the case, and this has enabled the customer to reduce associated labour costs by approximately 3x.

Prior to the introduction of the mobile app a manual tallying process was used to enter documents into the Business Operating System, resulting in frequent recapture errors. Utilising the mobile application, the customer now integrates directly to the Business Operating System from the tablet on which movements of cargo are being captured. This has significantly reduced the time required to capture the requisite information, eradicated duplicate captures and minimised the number of finger errors that occur during the process. In addition, Special Service Requests can now be captured on the tablet, improving billing accuracy and resulting in less leakage.

The mobile app was developed in Opus, the application development framework that forms part of Fraxses. Opus proved ideal for building a solution of this kind, offering the flexibility to implement changes in requirements at short notice and without affecting the project timeline. Following its success in South Africa, the app is currently being rolled out in other African countries.