Modernizing a Transport and Logistics ERP with Minfy

Project Overview:

Propelor India Pvt. Ltd., a transport and logistics company, was facing major infrastructure challenges while building an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Their workloads were hosted on EC2 servers with a single environment managing critical tasks like testing, deployment, networking, and scaling. This setup caused inefficiencies, higher costs, and exposed the company to security risks. The ERP solution required a modernized infrastructure and robust DevOps processes to meet its phased rollout and market demands. Engaging Minfy, Propelor leveraged industry expertise, a gap analysis of their existing solutions, and Minfy’s in-house capabilities to build a full-fledged ERP. The project aimed to integrate core business applications, address missing use cases, and create a scalable, secure, and cost-effective environment, helping Propelor extend their ERP to third-party logistics providers across APJ.

Challenges:  

Single Environment Limitation: Propelor’s existing infrastructure had a single environment for multiple critical functions, leading to bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies.

Cost Optimization Needs: Resource utilization was suboptimal, inflating operational costs without delivering corresponding performance gains.

Security Risks: The absence of robust security measures at both infrastructure and application levels increased vulnerability to potential threats.

Manual CI/CD Processes: Lacking an automated DevOps pipeline, deployments were manual, slow, and prone to errors, hindering Propelor’s goal of phased ERP deployment and faster market readiness.

ERP Gaps and Integration: Propelor’s core business applications were incomplete for a full ERP solution, requiring integration of existing solutions, gap analysis, and development to create a comprehensive ERP.

Solutions:  

Infrastructure Modernization: Minfy transitioned Propelor from a monolithic infrastructure to a cloud-native microservices architecture. Through a detailed gap analysis of Propelor’s existing systems, Minfy integrated and modernized core business applications to complete the ERP solution. The migration from EC2 instances to Amazon ECS Fargate, combined with Docker containerization, provided the company with flexible scaling and improved resource efficiency. This re-development allowed the system to dynamically scale based on real-time demand, cutting operational costs by 85% per application.

Development and ERP Build-Out: Leveraging Minfy’s industry expertise, the project began with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) approach. A cross-functional team, including industry experts engaged by Minfy, contributed to the product and solution ideation phase. Minfy helped Propelor simulate customer scenarios during user acceptance testing (UAT), ensuring that the ERP solution met real-world operational demands before moving to production. The result was a fully integrated ERP system that covered logistics, transportation, and third-party logistics (3PL) providers, generating new business models and revenue streams.

Enhanced DevOps Automation: Minfy established an automated DevOps pipeline using AWS-native tools. This included integrating SonarQube for code quality checks and deploying seven microservices on ECS Fargate. Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) was implemented to ensure seamless scalability based on workload demands, while centralized logging through the ELK stack, combined with CloudWatch monitoring, enabled proactive management. This automated pipeline not only reduced deployment times but also improved overall developer satisfaction and system reliability.

Security Enhancements: In addressing security concerns, Minfy implemented robust security measures, including Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), KMS-encrypted S3 buckets, and AWS CloudTrail for comprehensive activity logging. GuardDuty and AWS WAF were deployed to ensure constant monitoring and threat mitigation, safeguarding Propelor’s environment against potential cyber threats.

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Business Outcome:  

Cost Reduction: Migrating to a microservices-based architecture on Amazon ECS and Docker containers reduced the number of Amazon EC2 instances by 70%, leading to an 85% cost reduction per application.

Extended ERP and New Revenue Model: The ERP was extended to two third-party logistics providers across the APJ region, creating a new business model for Propelor and generating additional revenue streams.

Improved Security and Compliance: The implementation of MFA, encryption, and automated monitoring significantly enhanced Propelor's security posture, ensuring compliance with industry regulations.

Faster Time to Market: By leveraging Minfy's expertise in infrastructure and application modernization, Propelor was able to bring the ERP solution to market faster, reducing deployment times and improving developer satisfaction.

Operational Efficiency: The shift to a microservices architecture and automation through DevSecOps improved operational efficiency and scalability, allowing Propelor to better meet growing demands from their logistics and transportation network.