Cross-Team Partnership
Since 2016, Untold’s partnership with a Fortune 500 organic food distribution leader has taken many forms. The Untold team completed a wide variety of projects ranging from external marketing websites to core internal business logistics software to purely consulting engagements.
Untold’s expertise in Drupal is at the core of the relationship. Building their primary websites was an early win for both teams, but the real victory came in the simple automation around processing new customer requests. This feature has saved thousands of hours of manual data entry and is scalable for years to come.
Enterprise Drupal Applications
Additionally, the French/English translation features within the Canadian site solved both compliance and UI/UX problems when expanding throughout North America. Iterations and features on this site (and many more) characterize the next evolution in the relationship. Within this Drupal ecosystem, Untold was responsible for the maintenance and hosting of over 30 web properties.
After many successful engagements, Untold became a trusted ally and was engaged to build internal business tools to accelerating the business further. In a nutshell, moving crates of organic food to their final destination on shelves requires a tremendous amount of coordination between freight companies, warehouses, loading docks, etc. The Supplier Portal digitizes and automates repetitive manual processes for suppliers and internal stakeholders. The suppliers are empowered to upload and manage their own product information instead of requiring internal staff to track it, a process which used to involve pen and paper and phone calls.
The project integrated with a transportation logistics API for scheduling and managing distribution center appointments. Untold built a web application that schedules pickups and drop-offs by using Drupal as to add complex authentication and permissions requirements between services, adding a layer of JavaScript on top of the stack. Untold worked closely with the client's backend team to architect a robust API, ultimately ingesting it into a decoupled Angular app. This decoupled approach gave end users a more fluid experience than they might get with pure Drupal, modernizing the user experience. Weighing stability, accessibility, and security concerns with an easy-to-use, intuitive user interface, the appointments feature represents a strong step forward for the Supplier Portal, and for the future of their entire digital ecosystem. Logistics and information that used to require countless human hours of emails, spreadsheets, and faxes, are now automated and available at the push of a button.
Here, the Untold team effectively leveraged Drupal as a reverse-proxy server. Untold constructed a Drupal module to connect to an internal logistics service, wrote a suite of integration tests against to ensure data transmission, and then parsed the data into a more readable form, all while checking that any requests made from the front end were properly validated.
Additionally, complex access and security requirements necessitated custom permissions for users of different tiers. In order to display the appropriate data to the appropriate party, all teams needed to delineate each user by organization(s) and what role they had within it. Once requests and responses were pushed through Drupal, the frontend's Angular single-page application interacted with the API in a safe, intuitive, manner.
Technical Consulting
Consulting has emerged as another opportunity for Untold to work in conjunction with internal teams. Though Untold’s expertise has been shared with these teams for years, being asked to serve as consultants and architects on separate contracts is a new paradigm. Sometimes it’s as simple as teaching internal developers how to build within their own Drupal ecosystem, while other times Untold is consulted as a trusted partner in making overarching technological business decisions.
Learn More
Interested in learning more about this project? Let's get a mutual NDA countersigned so that the privacy of all parties is protected.