IS480: Final Year Project Freight Management Portal

www.TheShippingSolutions.com

Team Veritaz

Teamwork Initiative

Trust

Effort

The Shipping Solutions Private Limited

Introduction Demonstration Project Management Conclusion

New Electronic-Solutions and Media organization with an extensive background

in logistics

Relationships

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Direct Shipper

• Anyone E.g.: Professor Benjamin Gan

Forwarder

• Hansameyer Freight Forwarders

• Sky Truck Forwarders

Carrier

• Emirates • Heung-A

Carriers Category Breakdown

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FCL

•  Full container load

LCL

•  Less than container load

BreakBulk

• A great variety of goods that must be loaded individually and not in intermodal containers nor in bulk

Objective

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Improve efficiency and productivity, through the provision and advertisement of vital information of the services that these companies provide, to the

public

Video Demonstration

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Problems Encountered

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1. Lack of automated process and real-life information

2. Involves a lot of manual labor when placing a request

3. Sailing schedules and font sizes in Asian Shipper Magazine pose difficulties

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Fast and efficient means of searching for

schedule

Reduce probability of human error propagation

Reduce the tedious manual

process time

Provide ‘live’ updates and an avenue for the

shipping companies to

advertise

One-stop logistics platform

Our Success

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Development Progress

Till date, we have released 2 live betas on www.TheShippingSolutions.com

Beta 1: 1 September 2010 Beta 2: 22 October 2010

Our Success

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16 Supporting Partners

•13 Carriers • 3 NVOCCs

Client’s Testimonial

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System Architecture

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Functions

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1. Search Engine

2. Administrative Function

3. Roll Back

4. Member Administrative Control Panel

5. Advertisement Management

6. Statistical Function

www.theshippingsolutions.com

Demonstration

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Role Play

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Scene 1 - Rollback

Starring: Ernest and Reena

Roles: Ernest – Employee Reena – Employer

Description: Employee was fired and deleted all sailing schedules out of revenge

Role Play

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Scene 2 – Transshipment

Starring: Wei Hsien

Roles: Carrier

Description: Carrier could not find direct shipping lanes from Singapore to Taipei using the Asian Shippers Magazine

Role Play

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Scene 3 – Advertisement Management Function

Starring: Wei Yi

Roles: Carrier

Description: Newly set-up Company CMA, wants to publish an advertisement on the portal

Role Play

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Scene 4 – Statistical Function

Starring: Elizabeth

Roles: Carrier

Description: Carrier is having difficulties making decisions on which lanes to have next month

Issues faced

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1. Scale 6 Major functions • Several other minor supporting functions • Functions repeated in many aspects of the portal • Search • Lane Administration

•  Importance of Code Management •  Careful analysis before developing a feature -Allows reusable codes to be identified - Saves time for slight tweaks - Better code quality control

Issues faced

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2. Rollback • Storing data • Different data tables • Schedules • Member Profiles

• Different activities • Add • Delete • Edit

Issues faced

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2. Rollback

Issues faced

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3. Transshipment Search algorithm • Our own algorithm • Depth First Search

Common DFS algorithms we found: • Uses Stack/LinkedList class • Marker to mark explored nodes • Nodes are only explored once

Issues faced

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3. Transshipment Works for: • Traversing the graph • Finding one connected path • But does not find all possible connections

Slight tweaks • Removed marker • Used recursive method

Project Management

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We

ekl

y M

ee

ting

s • Administration • Minutes • Schedule

Tracking • Metrics Tracking • Coding

Supe

rvis

or &

Clie

nt

Too

ls • Fortnight

meetings with sponsors

• Weekly supervisor meetings

•Google documents •SVN •Dropbox •IBM Rational Team Concert

Project Management

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•  Employed iterative process (8 iterations) •  End of every iteration, performance of UAT •  End of every iteration, a review of schedule and

match capabilities against our pace

Project Management

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Overall, 4 major change of requirements:

1.Include an additional field in schedule table

2. Separation of schedule table

3. Multiple types for a company

4. Replace quotation with statistical function

Project Management

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Metrics adopted

1. Schedule Monitoring

2. Bug Monitoring

3. Usability Metrics

Schedule Overview

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No Planned Start Planned Finish Duration Actual Start Actual Finish Duration Delay

1 18 May 14 June 28 days 18 May 14 June 28 days 0

2 15 June 12 July 27 days 15 June 11 July 26 days -1

3 13 July 9 August 27 days 13 July 9 August 27 days 0

4 10 August 2 September 23 days 10 August 30 August 20 days -3

5 3 September 23 September 20 days 31 August 23 September 23 days +3

6 24 September 14 October 20 days 24

September 14 October 20 days 0

7 15 October 4 November 20 days 15 October 4 November 20 days 0

8 5 November 22 November 17 days 5 November 22 November 17 days 0

Schedule Overview

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• Ahead of time in iteration 4 Increased meeting frequencies to minimize impact for the next few iterations

• Delay in iteration 5 The need to complete the changes in the database structure was our priority since it would affect majority of our functions

Testing

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Testing Performed

1.  Internal Testing: Performed by team members before handing over to sponsor for testing

2.  User Acceptance Test: Sponsor to test according to test scripts

3.  Usability Metrics: Clients of The Shipping Solutions to evaluate the portal to meet their primary objective

Usability Metrics

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Usability

Comfort

Performance Navigation

Usability Metrics

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Usability Metric Form: Search

Usability Metrics

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Usability Metric Form: Advertisement Management

Usability Metrics

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Participants:

Usability Metric Collection

Collection End Period

Number of People

1 13 June 8

2 10 July 5

3 8 August 7

4 29 August 6

5 22 September 9

6 13 October 5

7 3 November 7

Usability Metrics

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Problems Faced

•Collection of data

- Email response and link on website were not desirable

- Few responded because they were not obliged to fill it in

•Implementation of results

- Unable to understand some of the feedback given

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Team’s Action

•Change of mode of collection, from email correspondences to hard copy forms

•Evaluating the changes suggested

Usability Metrics

Usability Metrics

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Overall Results

Navigation Performance Comfort

3.2

4.3 4.3

Score

Criteria

User Acceptance Tests

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•  We have completed 7 successful User Acceptance Tests (UATs)

User Acceptance Tests

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Execution

UAT Number Execution Date Attendees

1 13 June Barry, Jason, Julie

2 10 July Barry, Jason

3 8 August Barry, Jason

4 29 August Barry, Jason

5 22 September Barry, Jason, Julie

6 13 October Jason, Julie

7 3 November Barry, Julie

Bug Metrics

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Goal: To improve overall code quality

Question:

• How complex is the bug?

• How complex is the function?

Bug Metrics

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Client reporting bugs found

Bug Metrics

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Bugs Overview

Number of bugs

Iterations

Bug Metrics

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Bugs solving

Example: Iteration 4

•Bug Count: 30 •Bugs solved: 27

•3 was unsolved due to time constraints and severity of bugs were low. E.g. No proper validation of fields

Risks

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Risk Assessment Table

Risks

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Measures • Iterative risk approach • Re-evaluate our risks every 2 iterations • New risks are updated on spreadsheet

4 different versions

Risks

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Example in Iteration 3 and 4

Risks

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Example in Iteration 5 and 6

Learning Outcome

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Soft Skills Hard Skills

Project Management •  Scope management •  Quality management

Business IT Linkage Skills

Communication Skills •  Client management

IT Architecture and Development Skills

Key Takeaways

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“We learned how to better manage and communicate with the clients. Working together as a group is not easy due to different commitment levels and strengths of individuals. But overall we had an enjoyable experience working with everyone.”

“Although the technology used is not an unfamiliar one, there were many difficulties faced as well as the scope of the project is not small. There are many new algorithms such as the depth first search to pick up as well. It is a challenging project to me.”

Key Takeaways

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“The journey through FYP was not an easy one. We need to know how to balance our time and other commitments. Not only do we have to deliver a portal, but by making it ‘idiot proof’ and creating business values at the same time is not as easy as it seemed to be”

“One of the most challenging factors of this project was to handle a live server up and running. We have to bear full responsibilities of any mistakes found in the portal that was feedback by our sponsor’s clients. As students, I would say it is not easy as it a business that TSS is running. The biggest takeaway for me was to be able to create business values for our client and develop better project management skills”

Looking Ahead

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Develop Air Freight portal

Next FYP team

Outsource to

software vendors

Thank you

Additional Slides

DFS Tweaks

public void depthFirstSearch(LinkedList<Schedule> visited, int end, ArrayList<Schedule[]> transitList) { …….. for (Schedule node : nodes) { if (node.getPod().getPortID() == end) { continue; } visited.addLast(node); depthFirstSearch(visited, end, transitList); visited.removeLast(); } }

public Schedule[][] runTranshipmentSearch(int pol, int pod){ …… while(schedules.hasNext()){ Schedule sch = schedules.next(); if(sch.getPol().getPortID() == pol){ LinkedList<Schedule> visited = new LinkedList<Schedule>(); visited.add(sch); depthFirstSearch(visited,pod, tranList); } } ….. }

Code management example