Rhenus

Project Description

The Rhenus Group is a logistics service provider that operates all over the world. They have a suite of web applications and a hybrid mobile app that needed modernization, a new maintainer, and a new hosting solution.

The suite consists of an ERP application, a dispatch application, and a mobile application. The ERP system is utilized by back-office staff and synchronizes data with the dispatch application. Dispatchers rely on the dispatch application to coordinate pickups and deliveries of wood shipments. The mobile apps enable drivers to accept assignments, locate logs for collection, and track shipment progress.

We migrated these applications from the previous Kubernetes solution to Heroku. The move to PaaS allowed us to reduce the amount of maintenance work required to keep the applications and infrastructure up to date, increased reliability, and gave us a great starting point for adding features. The migration necessitated upgrades to each application stacks, which in turn meant we needed to rewrite some of the existing code because the upgrades made some parts outdated.

We created new deployment pipelines for each application and the mobile apps. The result was that we reduced the work required to deploy the mobile apps and created a more stable, automated release process for all systems.

This modernization laid the groundwork for the planned future upgrades and features, which we will continue to implement together with our partner Rhenus.

Challenges

One fun challenge we faced was improving how deployment worked. While improving the ERP and Dispatch server pipelines was pretty simple, deploying the mobile applications required some creativity because we didn’t like the number of steps required to get an app into the hands of drivers. The frontend and mobile apps all share a common codebase but are built for different targets. For iOS, we used the Xcode Cloud, which works incredibly well, but needed some initial work to get running, and for Android, we created our own GitHub Actions pipeline that gave us nearly the same seamless functionality as XCloud.

Finally, we had to ensure that everything still worked as before and that the complicated syncing between the ERP and the Dispatch server worked, and no data was lost or corrupted.