Platform Integration - LTL Business
Owner of all client integrations with in-house platform for the LTL line of business. Streamline standard API integrations, define, project manage and execute custom integrations.
The Context
Situation
The LTL (less than truckload) arm of business provides logistics services for large shipments belonging to B2B clients. The organisation is facing high client attrition and consistent drop in number of shipments. Clients looking to integrate with the LTL platform face multiple challenges since the APIs are not standardised, the documentation is not clear, post integration support is not streamlined due to which the integration time is very high at more than three weeks. A number of opportunities are missed due to there being no alternative of booking shipments for smaller businesses that are not tech enabled.
The Approach
Insight
Going through the existing API documentation, exploring the AWS API Gateway and testing the APIs manually revealed a number of problems with the LTL platform.
• Existence of duplicate APIs
• Inconsistent rate limits across the board
• Missing error handling and response codes
• No solution for small businesses lacking tech capabilities
• Inconsistent support or ticketing mechanism
• Platform inconsistencies faced by operations - slow data retrieval, shipping label errors, multi-box shipment handling
There were issues and missing features in the core product itself that were troubling not only the clients but also the internal operations teams. The organisation was losing client contracts, trust and revenue consistently due to these challenges.
Goals
As a Team Lead, my goals were clear:
• Stop the client attrition and increase revenue
• Collaborate with stakeholders - business development, operations, tech, product and clients to analyse the core issues and gather business requirements
• Streamline the standard APIs exposed to clients
• Decrease the integration effort for clients
• Build a product solution for clients lacking tech capabilities
Navigation
I led a team of three Integration Consultants focussing first on streamlining the standard APIs exposed to clients since this was the lowest hanging fruit - the APIs existed, a large number of clients were already integrated, the tech effort would be lower, APIs internal to the platform would be addressed leading to enhanced performance. Once the APIs were standardised and tested by the team, a working Swagger was published. A clear line of communication was setup with integrated clients for migration and end-to-end support.
A new feature for 'blind pickups' was defined and built to address the challenge faced by non-tech clients.
• A client panel to log a pickup request with bare minimum details
• A mobile app for the operations team to retrieve pickup details, add shipment details and generate shipping labels at the client site at the time of pickup
• Defined the end-to-end process flows
• Trained operations teams on the new process
The Results
Achievement
Within six months of taking charge as the team lead, we managed to double the amount of unique bookings for the LTL business. The massive API standardisation project reduced the client attrition by 90%. The client integration effort with the standard APIs was reduced to one week. The team then focussed on custom integrations and all things LTL Platform.
Learnings
Small but thoughtful changes can yield better results. I learned the importance of understanding the business process along with the systems/applications driving them.