Introduction

Wanting to have a better alternative to tracking containers by their bill or booking number in the Port of Houston portal and only seeing the snapshot at time of consult, resulted in the ideation of JUTS. Getting its name from things that stick out, a goal in its design was to have a solution that fundamentally lets you focus on the ones that aren’t following the logistics’ happy path.

The implementation was straightforward, the user provides the references (bill of lading or booking number) and JUTS will query the port system, marry up relevant data points such as vessel activity and gate events and funnel that data to drive smarter, cost saving decisions. A custom developed automation wrapper takes care of quering the port system in intervals that make sense on “where” you’re at in the process.

Adding references

In trying to keep a low barrier for data entry for users, adding references is a straightforward wizard. When pasting the data we check for duplicates, offer to associate them to a customer (optional), add tags (optional) for easy retrieval and seeing real time query feedback on the new references.

Digging into the data

Layering the data for the user to digest was always a consideration when designing pages, views. Using a (default sorted) table makes sense and with some creative interactions, displaying more relevant details with the option to go even further.

In the detail view, of a booking in this case, you can spot how the historic (yet relevant) changes of the vessel return window are shown. There are numerous smaller business cases solved within this detail. There is conversation thread where team members and customers could collaborate. The timeline view aims to offer a more visual view and captures the events as a sequence.

Foundations

One of the cornerstones of JUTS is the vessel schedule. There is a great deal of value to be derived from the ports’ vessel schedule data. There’s short and long term insights to be extracted that empower teams.

Short term, because of the need to stay informed on the containers that we are managing over the course of the weeks ahead. The first receive, cargo cutoff and the time between those are operation planning critical.Long term, to find trends. Profiling a specific shipping line, time of the year, economic influences.

It is noteworthy to mention that a user will most likely not scroll through this table or detail, rather they would interact with it in another context – such as the booking detail we saw.

User Experience, Convenience

Throughout the application, trying to keep in mind user experience, convenience a few features were added from the get-go. Search, because if there is something we all hate it is not finding something specific, quick. Implementing the spotlight solved that and offers users convenient way to navigate – optional without having to use their mouse.

We’ve also been seeing more applications with vertical menus, but many users are accustomed to horizontal, plus it maximizes real estate to render things, handy for those with smaller displays. And finally, built-in dark mode, that one speaks for itself.

Onboarding

Building an intuitive, friction-less team management component turned out to be more complicated than expected. Started off with Firebase (and their .NET SDK) but ended up leveraging Auth0 for authentication, authorization with the front and back end components.

For the tenant administrator role, which can be assigned, they just have to provide the email address of their team member. On our end, we are checking the tenant’s allowed domains and format of the email before allowing creation.

We have a small onboarding flow through Auth0 to record and timestamp when the user agreed to the terms and privacy policy and redirect back to the ‘first time seeing JUTS’ screen.

Management Module

JUTS was designed to be a multi-tenant platform. Upon creating a new tenant, a separate collection (database) is created which will be dedicated to the tenant and its activities. Authorization logic was constructed to only allow users coupled to this tenant to access its data through the user token requests.

As administrator we’re able to manage some tenant, user details, to simplify support.

Also keeping track of usage (API calls) in case pricing was set up based on usage instead of an all in rate.