Icreon and XPO had worked through a blueprint for an end-to-end integrated platform that would modularize their business. We worked with the XPO management team to identify the cost benefit and ROI for developing such a product, and migrating all existing third party dependencies to first party tools.
We came to the conclusion that technology would be the major differentiator in the long term, and started to build out the engineering portion of the project.
During the discovery phase, Icreon proposed developing a platform that acted as a ‘universal connector’ capable of transferring & interpreting data from disparate XPO service lines and customers.
In order to seamlessly migrate from existing third-party platforms, we would need to split into 3 agile development teams, each responsible for a different system that needed to be integrated into our middleware architecture. This involved engineering, test automation & deploying the solution. Finally, we built out a common library of interfaces that would allow other vendors and engineers to leverage our middleware to pull and push information from different systems.
Icreon & the XPO team revolutionized their integration architecture with the deployment of the universal connector. By standardizing how they integrated with customers third party POS platforms using an Enterprise Service Bus, they were able to significantly reduced costs during new customer acquisition.
In addition, the XPO fulfillment team now had mechanisms in place to enable capacity planning over time depending on business services.