Container Management System For McLarence Containers Pvt Ltd.

Abstract

McLarens Containers is a leading local inland container depot located in Welisara and has been in the business since 1979. It is spread over 8 acres of paved yard with the capacity to store 3,500 Twenty Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) stacked 5 high. McLarens containers currently use a standalone system for managing their container operations. However the present system has numerous functional deficiencies requiring considerable amount of manual intervention in order to fulfil current functional and MIS requirements. The inadequacy of the present system is a major drawback for the organization in retaining its leadership status in the container freight and logistics industry in Sri Lanka. Having realized the importance of an efficient web based Container Management System with real time accessibility McLarens Containers has embarked on migrating to a fully-fledged and functional system catering to current and future needs of the organization and its customers. While providing a superior customer experience McLarens Containers also target to achieve a strong customer relationship with the deployment of new system. The implemented Container Management System broadly caters to Container inward movement, Container outward movement, Container repair estimation, Container reservation, monitoring of container repairs, Customer invoicing, and Daily operational and periodic MIS reports. Rational Unified Process model used while developing McLarens CMS as it is an iterative software development process framework. Object oriented techniques were used in requirement analysis and design of the new McLarens CMS. UML diagrams were used to analyse the requirements and draw up the designs. The system was developed using MVC framework which stands for Model View Controller. PHP was used for the system as the server side scripting language, APACHE as the web server, MYSQL has been selected to implement database needs, and XAMP was used as a cross platform and open source package to fulfil all those service requirements. Outcome of the testing and user evaluation was successful and all the objectives were well accomplished in McLarens CMS.