Road Freight Transport Tender Automation

Abstract

Transport Tender is a consultancy company advising clients how to plan their logistic activities. Its focus is on road freight transport within Europe. In processes called tenders, the actual prices of new potential carriers are calculated for the shipments of the client of e.g. the last one or two years. Based on these prices, different sets of carriers are evaluated to cover all shipments for the client. Shipments are spread over multiple countries and because the potential carriers are mostly profitable in a small set of countries, this analysis is necessary and helpful. By choosing more carriers, chances increase a collectively lower price for the client’s transport could be established. However, the client wants to work with as few as possible third parties. This contradiction makes planning hard. Tenders help making this choice easier by making differences between options insightful. In this project, software is created to automate tenders. During a two week research phase, the client’s domain is explored and an understanding of the available data, its formats and the required analysis is developed. Requirements are formulated using the MoSCoW principle. A standardised input format for shipments and rates is designed and a web application is developed that can input these data and return the results of analysing them automatically. The application is developed using the Play Framework and Scala. Using a continuous delivery approach, an up-to-date version of the software was deployed on Heroku. Testing the software is mainly done by using automated unit, integration and functional tests. Code coverage reports are used to be able to focus testing activities. Quality of the software is maintained by analysing the source code regularly with Sonarqube. The final product is an innovative web application that is both user friendly and that is able to perform analysis quickly. Its innovation is not in a particular algorithm or idea, but in combining multiple sources of data and extracting valuable information. It automates the complete proces of tenders which reduces a lot of manual work for the client. No other similar services are known on the market. The price of transport is not completely decisive in the choice of carriers. Besides quantitive data like prices, qualitative data could be used in analysis. This could include carrier’s reputations or transit times. Besides that, the application’s scope could be expended to outside Europe and other types of transport, e.g. transport by ship, train or airplane.