Joe-Cargo: real-time freight and fleet tracking
- Period
- 2021 – 2023
- Sector
- Logistics
- Engagement
- Skysoft Technology, Cameroon
Role Tech Lead
A real-time tracking platform for shipments and fleet operations, from dispatch to delivery.
Context
A freight forwarder handles air and sea cargo across several agencies, tracking everything on paper from deposit to delivery. Operations teams needed live visibility into where every shipment and vehicle was, not a report generated an hour later.
Challenge
That real-time requirement framed most of the technical decisions: how state changes propagate, and how stale a dashboard is allowed to get. Beyond it, the platform still had to cover the full shipment lifecycle (deposit, warehouse storage, invoicing, client communication) across several agencies, with exportable documents required by clients and accounting.
Solution
I directed the data model around shipment lifecycle events rather than a single mutable "status" field, which made the audit trail and the various dashboards (ops, client-facing, fleet) all derivable from the same source of truth. On top of that sits an Angular / Spring Boot platform in hexagonal architecture: deposit registration, storage tracking, automated invoicing, client notifications by email and SMS, multi-agency management with role-based access, and PDF/Excel report generation through JasperReports. As usage grew, keeping query performance predictable under increasing tracking volume became a recurring theme in the architecture reviews I ran with the team.
Outcome
The full freight cycle digitised across several agencies, with live shipment and fleet visibility, and invoicing and reports generated automatically.
Highlights
- Event-based shipment lifecycle model instead of a single mutable status field
- Multiple dashboards (ops, client-facing, fleet) derived from one source of truth
- Architecture reviews focused on keeping query performance predictable as volume grew
- Deposit and warehouse storage management across several agencies, with role-based access
- Automated invoicing, payment tracking and PDF/Excel reporting
- Client notifications by email and SMS