Saving a Drowning Project: Gulf Winds Journey to a System Built for Growth
How Teric Technology and Cleverbit helped a Houston logistics company move on from a failed rebuild, to build a system that can keep up with growing business demands.
Gulf Winds a logistics provider based in Houston, Texas, needed a system that could keep up with a growing drayage and warehousing business. Their first attempt at a rebuild left them with poor visibility, weak communication and a solution that didn't match what the business actually needed. Here's how Teric Technology and Cleverbit stepped in, rebuilt the partnership from the ground up and delivered a system built to scale with them
TEAM
Adrian Abela
Team Lead - Cleverbit Software
“Replacing an aging system is crucial for business growth, but finding the right development partnership is equally important. With Teric Technology and Cleverbit, we found a team that not only met our technical requirements, but also prioritized communication, collaboration, and long-term maintainability for our critical system.”
A system that couldn’t keep up
Gulf Winds runs on a back-office system that manages, tracks, schedules, dispatches and invoices orders. All this alongside a driver app and a client-facing app that gives customers visibility into their shipments.
The system behind all of this was more than ten years old. It was difficult to maintain, impossible to upgrade and couldn’t scale with the business. As Gulf Winds grew, the gap between what the business needed and what the old system could deliver, kept widening.
When the first attempt didn’t work
Gulf Winds had already tried to fix the problem once. They engaged another software company to manage the rebuild, but the relationship didn’t go the way they needed. The client had little visibility into what the team was working on or how things were progressing, and there was a widening gap between what was being asked for and what was being built. For a system this critical to the business, that gap was a real risk.
Bringing in the right partners
Gulf Winds turned to Teric Technology, a US-based consultancy focused on technical guidance and strategic planning, to get the project back on track. Teric put processes in place to keep delivery frequent and requirements aligned with business priority, and brought in Cleverbit as their preferred implementation partner.
Saving a drowning project
When Cleverbit inherited the project, it had a large number of fundamental issues.
- Poor communication had led to features being missed, or unnecessary features added.
- A deployment hadn’t taken place in months and the client was not entirely sure about the state of what was being built.
- Certain architecture decisions were questionable, misguided or short-sighted.
Having analysed the project, plans were drawn up and executed to fix these underlying issues without blocking the development of necessary features. Within a few weeks, deployments were taking place regularly, urgent technical debt was fixed, other less urgent issues were identified and plans for their correction scheduled.
What we built
A back-office system that lets Gulf Winds manage, track, schedule, dispatch and invoice orders, as well as maintain their contracted drivers and trucks in line with legal and company compliance.
A driver app that lets contracted drivers accept dispatches, get guidance specific to each job and capture the signatures the work requires.
A client app to give Gulf Winds’ customers a dashboard view of their shipments, so they know where their orders stand without having to ask.
All that connected to third-party systems that track driver information, vehicle location, incidents and shipments automatically, so the data updates itself instead of relying on manual entry.
Complete re-write of the driver app
A new version of the driver application needed to be written from scratch. The version in use was written natively for a specific model of tablet, which Gulf Winds had to supply and maintain.
The functionality was streamlined, and proper effort was added to the User Experience, to cater for the various level of technicality to be expected from the users. A responsive app was delivered, which could run on the drivers’ own personal tablets or mobiles, allowing them to view the dispatches assigned to them, collect and transfer any paperwork as appropriate, and give updates to the back office on the status of the delivery
Messaging platform
Drivers need to be in constant contact with their dispatchers. The previous method of doing this through phone calls was slowing everyone down and wasting precious time. The messaging platform replaced that, allowing dispatchers and drivers to communicate with ease.
"One of the projects I'm proudest of is the messaging system we built for Gulf Winds. Their drivers needed an easy way to reach dispatchers without picking up the phone every time. We built a system that works as part chat and part support ticket, so drivers can also send SMS and MMS, and dispatchers can push out announcements. It now handles thousands of messages a day and has saved the dispatch team a huge amount of time. That's the part of this job I enjoy most, watching something you built get used, and hearing from the client that it made a difference."
Keeping the process transparent and tight
Throughout the engagement, we had daily calls to cover progress and blockers, as well as weekly calls with the product owner to cover new features and their priority – always tied to business outcomes.
We also conducted weekly calls with Teric to cover architecture decisions for upcoming work, a weekly cross-team meetings to track dependencies, as well as demos every two weeks to confirm deliverables are on track.
Automated testing ran through all the process. This ensures that the project is built for long-term maintainability rather than short-term speed.
One team, working together
Cleverbit started small, with a team lead and two developers who brought .NET and React expertise to the project. The team then grew to fifteen engineers, working alongside Teric and Gulf Winds’ own technical team, who we helped train on coding standards, architecture decisions and a shared UX framework. All was documented in a live wiki that new developers used to get up to speed.
That is what an embedded engineering partnership looks like in practice, not a handoff, but a team that stays.
Wrapping up
Working in partnership, Teric Technologies and Cleverbit Software have facilitated Gulf Winds in taking substantial strides. Combining strategic vision, technical acumen, and hands-on implementation, we developed a system that could scale with Gulf Winds.
“The team at Cleverbit has been exceptional in implementing the solution. The daily meetings and open communication have significantly improved the efficiency of the delivery process. We are confident in the long-term maintainability of our system thanks to the focus on scalability and implementation of automated testing. The attention to detail and emphasis on business outcomes throughout the project has been instrumental in achieving our goals of creating a more efficient and effective system for our growing business. Thank you for your hard work and dedication to this project”