Road warrior

How do you describe Elogex?

Elogex is a provider of collaborative logistics management solutions. Manufacturers, distributors, and retailers are frustrated with the traditional transportation management solutions that are limited to outbound freight from a single facility or division. What our system allows [companies] to do is use Internet-based software [so they can] dynamically optimize and execute their inbound and outbound transportation across all their corporate divisions and their trading partners.

Why offer this function as a service?

In today’s world, you have a lot of shipments that you throw into this big planning engine, the algorithms churn away, and it spits out a plan. The issue that a lot of people are having is that somewhere between only 15 [percent] to 20 percent of the plan actually gets executed on correctly because trucks break down and people miss appointments. The Elogex system allows optimization at the point of execution. We do dynamic optimization in an execution manner. By that I mean every time that someone tenders a shipment out, and they execute on a transportation move, we run algorithms in the back to check the optimal paths. So now you can execute on the plan dynamically.

What’s the business issue you are trying to solve?

The business issue is the cost of freighters. By helping centralize carriers, we’re able to squeeze out between 8 [percent] to 12 percent out of that cost. The other thing that we are allowing is called a continuous move. Let’s say that I’m shipping something from North Carolina to California, and that truck goes out to California. The carrier has to then try to find some freight to bring that truck back to home. One out of every three trucks that you see on the road today is riding empty. We allow some visibility within the system … in other words, you could use the capacity within your company first, then your trading partners’, then the entire network. When that happens, the carrier will extend anywhere from a 10 [percent] to an 18 percent discount on both legs of that shipment.

How does the service work?

On the technology side, we have a single distributed application. We’re doing everything as nodes. On the application server tier we have node zones of application servers that are load balanced, so you have your requests that are coming in. Then we segment the application into multiple nodes of application servers, so that we can have different components of our offering residing on different zones. That allows us to distribute the load evenly. And it allows us to do some really unique things with tuning the applications so we get really good redundancy and near-linear scalability.

What are benefits of the software as a service model?

When you look at this as a unified platform built on a multi-tenant architecture you get a single instance of software where you can build in a world class redundancy and security. And once you build it for one customer, everyone has it. The same thing applies to product code quality. … All of our QA is completely automated, so we’re running a full automated regression test of the entire app every night, except for new functionality. It allows you to just completely turn the software development process on its head and do things at a pace that was really unheard of before.

What application servers are you using?

We were running WebLogic with BEA. But we replaced the entire application server infrastructure with JBoss. It’s a lot faster to develop with JBoss. And it also eliminates a lot of cost. In a production-type environment, the reason that we’re going with it is because the JBoss EJB containers are much clearer and a more concise container. It doesn’t have all periphery things running like WebLogic does. You don’t have the content server, the integration server, and all those things bundled in together. So it deploys very clean and it scales much better so you can actually run much higher loads on it.

What’s your take on Web services?

We’re using webMethods right now, but we have a couple things that we’re going to be rolling out on the Web services side. What’s kind of unique about our ASP is that we have a highly unified carrier base. Carriers are shared across multiple customers. That allows us to create interfaces to one single point that services multiple customers. What we’re planning on doing is pushing out a Web services infrastructure for the carriers that would essentially take the value-added networks running EDI out of the picture to eliminate cost.

What impact will wireless technologies have in this space?

We’re working on a message-queuing format with a company called Kenamea where we’re doing some really neat stuff on the Pocket PC. The other thing that we’re looking into is VoiceXML because the carriers out on the road — although they have GPS — don’t want to give GPS information out to the shippers because it might show that they’re going 100 miles an hour, or that they’re staying up [for] 15 hours. One thing that we’re kind of proposing is to allow a status update where carriers can call into and dynamically update the network. That still gives the carrier the flexibility to kind of bend the truth to their whim.