Odyssey Logistics & Technology
Company
Odyssey Logistics & Technology Corporation, founded in 2002 and headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut, is a multi-modal logistics provider with distribution sites in the United States, Europe and Asia. Its freight network of nearly $2 billion covers 520,000 lanes and more than 100 ports, and it moves cargo estimated at over $60 billion, domestically and internationally, with thousands of carriers.
Customers can work with Odyssey as a third-party (3PL) or fourth-party (4PL) logistics provider, as a broker, through intermodal marketing, or through WIN (Web Integrated Network), its community of shippers and carriers.
Its services range from door-to-door intermodal, truckload, less-than-truckload and bulk transportation to international shipping (customs brokerage, freight forwarding and non-vessel operating common carrier services) and sample fulfillment, including the storage, packaging and shipping of hazardous and non-hazardous materials for manufacturers.
Odyssey also offers logistics consulting (market intelligence, supply chain optimization, network analysis and redesign, benchmarking), managed logistics services such as procurement, rail car tracking and operations, and warehousing, including terminals for liquid and dry bulk materials and storage for temperature-sensitive goods. It serves the chemical, consumer and retail, energy, food, industrial, medical and metal industries.
All of this runs on Odyssey’s web-based global transportation management platform, which handles day-to-day transactional logistics: transportation optimization, carrier selection, execution, visibility, event management and analytics. The platform is built on Java and open-source frameworks, with IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM Operational Decision Manager (JRules BRMS), IBM Process Server (BPM) and an Oracle database.
Our Role
The company was looking for cost-effective, reliable offshore resources to help build a new online transportation logistics management software (TMS). The platform had to be built from scratch, so we needed to work on its architecture and design. When creating any enterprise application you need to create the UI and the backend and to make sure that it is scalable, flexible and user-friendly.
Scope of Work
HiTech provides full-stack development, manual QA, QA automation, production support, and configuration management. We were responsible for building the platform in Java; it is scalable and flexible and the backend is based on service-oriented architecture principles. It uses the Spring Framework on the backend and Bootstrap for the UI.
Odyssey wanted to make the UI simple and intuitive, but the underlying logic is complex, so it was a big challenge. To deal with this, we brought in talented UI/UX people for discussions and brainstorming sessions. This platform uses a Google Web Toolkit for the UI, which uses the same Java as the rest of the platform. As a result, the system scales pretty well.
The Team
In total, a team of 30+ people was assigned to the project, including developers, project managers, QA testers, QA automation, and production support. Odyssey talked to project managers, team leads, software development managers, and also to some lead developers.
All the teams together (development, QA, configuration and support) give life to a competency center, which is our advantage, compared to ordinary outsourcing and outstaffing companies.
