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National Air Cargo

National Air Cargo's (NAC) business is predicated on their ability to ship anything, anywhere in the world, in nearly any timeframe imaginable. From automobiles to weapon systems; sales brochures to trade show booths; spare computer parts to aircraft wings; NAC has no weight or size restrictions and provides same day, next day, 2nd day, and deferred shipping services.  The company needed an enterprise solution that allowed them to better manage their assets and their customers’ needs.

Scenario

NAC accepted shipment requests from customers by phone or via a Microsoft Access application that uploaded orders daily. Their customers appreciated many of the functionalities built into the application, including the ability to find answers to their questions and quickly escalate large shipments but NAC’s customer base was growing rapidly and the deployment and support costs for the application were quite high.  The company recognized the need to investigate alternative software solutions before they outgrew the capabilities of their current system.

The Algonquin Solution

Algonquin Studios delivered Web Accuship, a web site that allows customers to login, access shipment quotes, arrange pickups, and consolidate shipments.  Algonquin worked with NAC to integrate Accuship with their already existing enterprise shipment management system, allowing for increased shipping efficiencies and faster delivery times. During this project, Algonquin Studios also helped to streamline NAC's rating algorithm. The new algorithm makes calculating shipment costs based on level of service, item(s) being shipped, point of origin and destination, as well as optional shipment factors easier than ever.

Algonquin Studios used Microsoft Windows 2000, Internet Information Server, Active Server Pages, COM+ components and SQL Server 2000 to create the custom web-based application.

Result

Web Accuship is a strategic advantage for NAC, allowing them to reform the heavy-shipping industry through the elimination of deployment costs at customer sites and an increase in their responsiveness to their customers.

An image of the win32 application that NAC staff uses to manage clients, shipments, and resources. It talks with the same enterprise system that drives information on the customer site.

An image of the web site that customers use to manage their shipments. This screen allows customers to generate reports directly from the live database.

The customer web site can even be used by NAC's remote staff to get status reports on client shipments. Because this enterprise system can be deployed through more than one interface, it makes the whole process much more flexible.