FATA #18 — Design of Nova Poshta.

4 min readJul 24, 2022

Execution Summary

Context view

Execution summary

Client request: The Nova Poshta is aiming to be a major national player of delivery small and medium parcel to the door. Nova Poshta already providing warehousing and cargo long-distance delivery (mainly for drop-shipping) and following new Business Strategy opening a new separate branch of last-mile delivery service for marketplaces of various sizes (small & medium, non-food). The company needed transportation management and automated route planning software. It has to be integrated with the already existing business systems. Nova Poshta want to offer our customers the easiest and fastest possible way to deliver their goods from their hands to address/customer. Nova Poshta want to offer loyalty incentives for our frequent customers as well. Apps for customer and couriers and pick-up places/sorting centers/employees.

Targeted Results for Nova Poshta:

The total delivery time optimization and loss minimization
Overhead reducing, covering all logistics processes in the company with a single system
Growth of the return on each vehicle unit and increasing the whole gross profit

Customer Business Goals

Take as much as we can from market share
Minimum operational costs
Business continuity and growth

Customer Challenges

Reduce cost and time spends on route planning and control to increase revenue from transportation services
Optimize fleet maintenance cost to grow up the return on each vehicle unit
Build an organic and interconnected business ecosystem to cover all logistics operations and scale profits through modules’ synergies

Key aspects of the system

Highly configurable (support of several configuration layers: country, customer)
Highly extendible (adding of new features without interruption)
Calculates optimal routes and schedule and lists for delivery
Simplifies authentication for customer

Use cases

Concerns
CRN-1: Establishing an initial overall structure as this is a greenfield system.

Client:
CUC-1: Order taxi
The client should open the mobile app after see maps with cars on the map, filter car order options take the order to sit in a taxi and finish the order.

Driver:
DUC_1: Take order
The driver should see real-time orders in pending state that he can filter, once it is accepted he should see a route and once it is picked a client, should see starting and destination points and see the state of the trip.

Admin:
AUC-1: Support data analytics
Admin should see statistics of orders by filtering and creating custom dashboards on the admin portal.

List of ASRs

Availability — 24/7, 99.9%, one region, 2–3 availability zones
Reliability — processing client requests even when Core System (WMS is down), fault masking, supporting eventual consistency
Interoperability — support syn/asyns messaging with Core System, supporting CORE System APIs, integration with 3rd party (payment system, weather, road traffic)
Configurability — enabling Fleet Manager to create new Post Office and configure parcel’s and other parameters manually (via portal, no coding skills are needed)
Performance — UI/App click response time 2–3 seconds
Security — integration with LDAP/AD, logging attacks, and fraud suspicious, support GDPR and PII, data should be encrypted by async key
Scalability — depends on peak time resources to be auto scale in/out to support demand during a day

List of Assumptions

Core system already provides capabilities marked green (refer to next slide)
Core System provides all required Internal/External integration via API, creating any new direct integrations is out of scope
Target solution to be Cloud-based, Mobile Clients to be PWA based
Loyalty Program — SMS/Email notification capabilities are already exist on a customer side and out of scope
Loyalty Program — contain simple one report based on customer order’s/return’s/complain’s history, Marketing User use this report to support any loyalty initiatives manually
3rd parties components to be used to accelerate implementation — Road Optimization, Notification (SMS/Push), Payment provider, Portal CMS

Capability view

WBS (Work-break down) & Estimations

Project Schedule

Resource Plan

Conceptual diagram

A predictive model which ingests the make & model of the vehicle a driver is using for deliveries and optimizes the max. payload the driver’s vehicle can fit against the route the driver must take.