About the client
Kolsar Recycling is a recycling company delivering their services to several counties.
The challenge
Kolsar in their daily business performs numerous deliveries and collections from a huge geographical area.
They had been using a simple excel sheet to keep track of their schedule, but as the company has grown, that became harder to follow.
Route planning is a tedious and time consuming task, where mistakes could happen.
Goal
Delivery of an application, which:
- Is accessible with several types of devices (desktop computers, tablets)
- Secured and available only to the authenticated users
- Provides different sets of capabilities for various users
- Allows pick-up/delivery scheduling
- Plans optimal pick-up/delivery routes
- Maintained at minimal cost
Technology Stack
React.js, MaterialUI, Node.js, Express.js, MapQuest, Leaflet.js, MongoDB.
The process
To achieve quick delivery time and reduce development cost a responsive web application was designed, with intent to render on two kinds of devices.
Reusable MaterialUI components provided “nice on the eye” look, with reduced design and development time.
JWT allowed secure access only to the authenticated users. All handled by Node.js engine, which was picked as the lightweight backend solution.
MapQuest was selected as the route optimization SaaS, which’s output was drawn on Leaflet.js map together with extra controls to manipulate the route as the delivery went on.
To limit quota usage, the reverse geocoding results were cached in the database with a long TTL, as these were unlikely to change.
MongoDB was selected as the storage backing up the backend, as it had to store geocoding data of variadic structure, and non-relative user data.
Purchasing a long term subscription at local hosting provider allowed to minimize the maintenance cost to 2.5$/month and no extra costs for remaining services and licences.
Actions separation by user roles, prevented different types of employees unprivileged actions.
Result
With the designed solution the customer could switch from their excel files, and plan the deliveries in his office, while the drivers were able to perform their tours and notify the office whether the delivery was paid on the spot, delayed until collection, or inform about postponed collection date.
A single tool has taken over the planning, scheduling and settlement of payments, becoming the main mean of management.
