From point A to point “Possible”—engineering the future of logistics.
Project
Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Texas, BNSF Logistics is a technology and people-driven third-party logistics company providing smart, creative supply chain solutions. With close to $1 billion in annual revenue, BNSF Logistics is a market leader in the 3PL space and is focused on a digital-first future.
BNSF Logistics was challenged with an ambitious product roadmap, and partnered with Transcenda to help accelerate their development capabilities.
Having not previously partnered with an external engineering agency, BNSF Logistics was worried about quality, a third party's ability to integrate and work with their existing team, security and confidentiality.
At the same time, they wanted a partner who could help them ramp up quickly and immediately start tackling projects within their roadmap while the internal team continued working on projects that were already planned. As for specific projects, BNSF Logistics was interested in building out functionality related to the management and customer experience around booking non-standard loads for shipping, including Rail, Wind and Intermodal.
What we did
Product feature definition
DevOps and release management
Quality assurance, manual and automation
Project and product management
Frontend engineering in React
Backend engineering in .Net
Release management
Extensive integrations
Data transformation and processing
“Working with Transcenda has helped us achieve measurable business results. They have top-quality engineering talent and take full ownership of end-to-end delivery. It was impressive how quickly their team came up to speed on our technology and domain. In working with Transcenda, I feel they truly care about our business, and everyone on the team has been a pleasure to work with, from the engineers to the executive management team.”
Tom Madzy
CIO, BNSF Logistics
Tom Madzy
CIO, BNSF Logistics
Takeaways & results
One of the largest project challenges was ensuring the delivery of new features in a timely manner while contributing to the overall platform stability and performance improvements. Considering the legacy code and integrations, planning the work while also working with quite a bit of unknown every sprint took considerable expertise and effort by both teams.
One of the first initiatives Transcenda introduced was building the end-to-end QA automation framework that would empower a high level of quality, without slowing down the team velocity and ensuring new features would not break any of the existing parts of the system.
Balancing competing business priorities and ensuring alignment toward common business goals was another challenge Transcenda faced when considering functionality and technical trade-offs. The team overcame this through daily communication with product and logistics managers, regular bi-weekly sessions with the executive team and close alignment with engineering. The time investment and development approach were worth the effort, and Transcenda successfully delivered solutions that created measurable business outcomes and value for BNSF Logistics.
Cost savings of over 500k+ annually
50% increase of load count per head
Re-imagined customer experience for new revenue streams
