My Rent A Pallet is a web platform that allows RAP’s clients to rent pallets from them. It handles the movement and stock levels of all the pallets in RAP and in the different storage centers: their offices, customers distribution centers, warehouses, and stores, among many others.
It provides an intuitive interface to track the pallet requests and their status. All this data is cross-tracked with SAP for invoicing.
The system works on a multi-tenant way at the country level, but allows movements of pallets between some entities that have a presence in more than one of the countries RAP serves.
Client Rent A Pallet
Region Central America & Miami
Services Software Development
Year 2017-Present
Features
- Customers request and return pallets delivered to their Stores or Distribution centers.
- Reporting of the pallet transactions and their state, all downloadable to MS Excel files.
- Management of user accounts for the different roles in RAP’s organization and at the customer level.
- Pallets inventory management for RAP as a business, besides the movement of that inventory.
Challenges
- The system allows RAP to adjust a customer initial balance and automatically rebuild all inventory history related to that customer from that moment in time on, in order to keep data integrity.
- The delivery of pallets is done via available delivery timeslots, which can be configured in the administration, so the customer can request a certain amount of pallets on a specific schedule, allowing RAP to manage its transport capacity.
- An internal movement policy was implemented where RAP’s customers can have sub-customers (storage centers of their own) and they can request and transfer pallets between each other by themselves, removing strain from RAP’s operation.
- The system automatically rebuilds inventory transaction history if an operation is registered retroactively, which happens when someone in the transport chain forgets to track their movement on that day and do it later.
Technologies
- Ruby on Rails 5
- PostgreSQL
- Sass, Slim, and CoffeeScript
- jQuery & Bootstrap
- AWS Infrastructure
- Dockerized development environment & CI