Lynden Uses FuseSource’s Enterprise-Class Distributions of Open Source Integration and Messaging Solutions to Improve Shipment Tracking and Reporting for High Volume Customers

SOURCE: FuseSource

Lynden Uses FuseSource’s Enterprise-Class Distributions of Open Source Integration and Messaging Solutions to Improve Shipment Tracking and Reporting for High Volume Customers

The Fuse Message Broker product provides Lynden with a reliable messaging solution that is both affordable and able to scale as the amount of freight Lynden processes and delivers continues to increase.

Lynden has been committed to solving complex transportation problems for its customers since 1906 and has a strong reputation among various industries including oil and gas, mining, construction, retail and manufacturing for on-time delivery to some of the world’s most remote locations, including Alaska and Western Canada. The Lynden family of companies includes land, sea and air freight services.

Recently, the company’s rapid growth and increase in customer demand for real-time insight into the status of freight made it clear that Lynden needed a better way for mobile devices to communicate with its tracking system. The system also needed to be capable of scaling to far greater demand in order to handle growing freight volume. Finally, it needed to be tolerant of weak or lost connections to mobile networks in remote locations and to be able to smoothly resume the collection of essential tracking information for their customers once a connection was re-established.

The Fuse Message Broker solution was integrated with Lynden’s legacy UniVerse DB applications, Java, Web and desktop applications, and hand-held Windows CE devices. The hand-held devices at each warehouse allow Lynden employees to scan each box and container coming to or leaving their location, communicate with the company servers and update the database so that each device always has the latest information for each piece of freight moving through the system. When reliability issues arose due to poor Wi-Fi connections between individual devices and the company servers in their remote locations, the FuseSource team helped Lynden’s IT staff develop a proxy server with a reliable connection to the message broker.

“Having a dependable system for tracking each and every piece of freight that we ship is absolutely critical for our business,” said Rob Terpilowski, senior software engineer and lead Java developer at Lynden. “Our customers rely on us to provide an accurate and real-time status update for every item we are responsible for moving, no matter how remote the destination. In addition to this, our warehouse staff can use this information to improve our own efficiency by monitoring when and where each shipment is delivered or processed. We decided to use FuseSource’s enterprise-class distribution of Apache ActiveMQ because it provided us with a reliable way to have our systems communicate with each other and pull the data we need to guarantee that our customers always have the information they require at each step of the shipment.”

The company researched a number of solutions but found that traditional vendor offerings are prohibitively expensive and often the vendor is unable to address a customer’s needs unless they are purchasing an entire system, not improving existing infrastructure. Lynden ultimately chose FuseSource’s lightweight and flexible enterprise-class distribution of ActiveMQ as a means of improving their system because it had client software that could run within C# applications, it has a proven track record of reliability, it is cost effective and FuseSource is able to provide access to the experts who know the software best.

The system manages the scanning and tracking of up to 70,000 pieces of freight per day. Plans to implement the system with other members of the Lynden family of companies such as Lynden International, a full-service domestic and international freight forwarder with more than 50 offices throughout the world, will cause that number to rise to as much as 300,000 pieces of freight being tracked daily. Plans are also in place to integrate desktop applications for warehouse managers and customer service representatives who require immediate access to information for every order.

“Our distributions of Apache Software Foundation integration and messaging projects enable companies like Lynden to solve their complex IT challenges in order to increase efficiency and gain immediate, guaranteed access to the information they need to best serve their customers and respond to the growing demand for data in real-time without replacing entire IT systems,” said Rob Davies, CTO of FuseSource and co-founder of the Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ and Camel projects. “Our customers know that our team is best equipped to guide a project to completion and maximize the benefits gained from using open source software in the enterprise.”

For more information on Lynden’s use of FuseSource’s open source integration and messaging solutions read the case study here: http://fusesource.com/collateral/166.

About FuseSource

Backed by the leaders and founders of several key Apache Software Foundation projects, FuseSource Corp. is the expert in open source integration and messaging. The company is solely focused on providing enterprise-ready integration and messaging software combined with the tools, training and “expertise”/enterprise-support/consulting sought by organizations implementing and managing integration projects such as SOA, cloud environments and others. Hundreds of large enterprises worldwide rely on FuseSource solutions to deploy and manage integration and messaging infrastructure at a lower total cost of ownership than traditional commercial solutions. FuseSource is a wholly owned subsidiary of Progress Software Corporation and can be found on the web at fusesource.com.

FuseSource, Fuse, Fuse ESB, Fuse Message Broker, and Fuse Mediation Router are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the United States and other countries. Any other names contained herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.