Rebuilding the Warehouse Management System from Scratch

• 2+ million lines of code rewritten
• Increased deployment speed by 8 times
• Custom feature integrations
• WMS logic optimization

United States Cold Storage, Inc. came into existence over a century ago, in 1889. Now the company employs more than 2,000 people and operates about 38 temperature-controlled warehouses across 13 U.S. states.

In addition to cold storage and distribution, USCS provides warehousing services with a total storage space exceeding 270 million cu.ft. The company also offers third-party logistics solutions to the refrigerated food industry taking care of customers’ freight import and export.

35% of all goods stored at USCS are shipped across the ocean to the renowned American and international food companies. Handling a massive flow of goods, USCS manages to successfully fulfill all the storage requirements and provide quality services to every partner.

United States Cold Storage (USCS) was looking for a software development partner who could help them to rebuild and launch their existing Warehouse Management System (WMS) by performing reverse engineering, auditing, and code refactoring.

The codebase implemented by the previous vendor was unstable and contained many errors which made it impossible to maintain. Thus, the product could not be delivered to facilities. A number of system screens could load for more than a minute which is unacceptable. Moreover, some parts of the WMS could not be opened and crashed on a regular basis.

Innovecs’ software engineers were supposed to take on the responsibility of bringing the client’s WMS back to life by thoroughly reviewing and completely rewriting more than 2 million lines of code.

Based on the code review, Innovecs initiated the process of architecture refactoring, code rewriting, and overall functionality improvement to make the client’s WMS function sustainably. The team optimized the logic of the system to avoid delayed responses to user requests.

Let’s outline some of the upgrades made.

The team has rearranged and modernized the WMS infrastructure by migrating it to the WebSphere Application Server for Linux. Originally, the application was hosted on the IBM server, which is rarely updated and hard to maintain. It made development troublesome taking much time to release updates.

The migration helped resolve the issue. The WMS operation improved while the deployment speed went from 2 hours to 15 minutes. For USCS, this migration resulted in a quicker and more stable software operation.

The idea behind caching is to store frequently used data in RAM (PC’s working memory) and access it faster instead of sending requests to the database every time.

The Innovecs team has reduced the number of calls to the database and accelerated its work. Now the rarely changing data is stored in the cache. This improvement also accelerated the overall software speed.

The software used JSP (the Java Server Page technology) making unnecessary calls to the database even if a user went back to the previous page. It caused inconvenience and performance speed decrease.

Moving from JSP to Single Page Application (Angular) happened to be an optimal solution displaying all the loaded data, which is simple-to-navigate for users and developers. Improvements to the database have also been made and are ongoing.

The Innovecs team has recovered the WMS codebase which increased deployment speed by 8 times. The software is now production-ready, and a number of warehouses have already implemented the solution on their premises.

In addition to many technological upgrades, Innovecs has been able to add numerous functional enhancements to the client’s mission-critical systems.

The USCS team is working on-site, whereas Innovecs is responsible for WMS preparation, data migration, and integration of custom features to match specific requirements of warehouses.