Success Stories
Turning a 10-year-old costing engine into a fast, scalable revenue and cost calculation solution
Overview
An established Australian freight and supply chain organisation encountered significant operational constraints arising from a decade-old, highly complex revenue and cost calculation system. Managing global shipments across multiple transport providers and rate structures led to prolonged processing times, frequent manual intervention, and a pronounced reliance on a limited number of subject-matter experts. The legacy platform, comprising in excess of 50,000 lines of code, constrained responsiveness to evolving business requirements and introduced heightened operational risk.
VitalFew was engaged to address these challenges. A comprehensive assessment of existing workflows was undertaken, followed by the design and redevelopment of the platform with a clear emphasis on simplicity, performance, and scalability. The codebase was reduced from 50,000 to 200 lines, while processing time improved from over seven hours to approximately 30 minutes.
The resulting solution offers improved maintainability, reduces dependency on individual expertise, and enables the organisation to respond with greater agility to pricing and network changes.
Challenges
The project presented a number of significant challenges, primarily driven by the complexity of legacy systems and limited supporting documentation. Data flows and underlying business logic were difficult to assess due to unclear processes and fragmented integrations.
The cost and revenue calculation processes were originally developed over a decade ago and subsequently modified without formal documentation.
An extensive and highly complex codebase comprising over 50,000 lines of T-SQL.
Sequential data processing, limiting performance and scalability.
Batch-processing-based data synchronisation between transactional data stores and the data warehouse, restricting data availability and timeliness.