Bolloré Mobile

Bolloré

Established for more than 50 years in 41 countries, and boasting 200 agencies, they are a key player in port activity, and a specialist in terrestrial transport as well as an expert in tailor-made logistics solutions.

“Responsive, business oriented, well-structured and with a good quality at each release, the dedicated Hexacta team has been a good partner to achieve our various goals on this project.
Thus, I want to thank everyone in Hexacta who has been involved in this success.”

Laurent Sainte Beuve, Project Leader, Bolloré

Brief description of the company

Bolloré is the leading integrated logistics network in Africa. Established over 50 years ago in 41 countries, they are key players in port activity, specialists in terrestrial transport as well as experts in tailor-made logistics solutions.

The challenge

Bolloré had been working with Hexacta for over 3 years on Ipaki project, their container management system, when the need for a mobile version of the application appeared.
For some countries, it was required to speed up the process of registering the vehicles that entered the terminals by using a handheld terminal to scan them.
The same database as the web application had to be used, since the referential would be the same, and after the vehicles were entered into the system, they would also be managed through the Web app, Ipaki.
The challenge was to implement a rich client for Windows CE 5.0 for Motorola handhelds that should be able to work offline and be synchronized once it was docked with access to the network (Occasionally Connected System (OCS)).

Solution

Hexacta decided to assign the same development team that had been assigned to the web application Ipaki, in order to take advantage of their business domain knowledge and technology.
Ipaki web app provided a set of web services which were already used by other integrated systems. Hexacta decided to reuse the same services to ‘upload’ the events that were registered offline.

Applied Technologies

  • Microsoft .NET
  • Compact Framework v3.5
  • Microsoft Sql Server CE
  • Visual Studio 2008
  • Microsoft WCF