Our Success Stories

Mainfreight NZ

"Mainfreight credits a significant percentage of their customer gains and retention to the solutions provided by Designertech"
Kevin Drinkwater
CIO of Mainfreight.

After several acquisitions and with global expansion well under way, Mainfreight NZ found itself operating a range of disparate systems in several countries and unable to offer its clients a seamless customer experience – enter Designertech’s .NET development specialists.

Mainfreight NZ owned nine companies running seven different operational systems and nine different databases across four countries. If a customer placed an order with an Australian supplier for delivery to a warehouse in Auckland, four different divisions, and hence four disparate technology systems, would be involved in organising and processing that order. As no systems were connected, staff could only report on the status of an order in their specific division – meaning the customer had to engage with each separate organisation to successfully track and monitor the order through to completion.

The vision – seamless connection of technology platforms on a global scale. Mainfreight sought a technology solution that would enable the company to link information across all its divisions and, ultimately, provide its customers with a complete view of the supply chain from one central point. The vision was to provide customers with a single portal that could deliver information from multiple sources, no matter which part of Mainfreight undertook the physical process.

The solution – Designertech develops Mainchain

Designertech’s .NET development team took up the challenge to provide a solution to Mainfreight’s problem and in February 2003 Mainchain went live.

Mainchain was developed using Microsoft .NET and Windows Server 2003 technologies to rapidly connect multiple databases, on multiple systems, in multiple countries simultaneously, using XML Web services in a scalable and cost-effective manner. Developed in just two months using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Mainchain is hosted on a clustered Windows Server 2003 platform using SQL ServerTM 2000 as the back-end database. XML Web services connect with and run queries across the company’s multiple databases and systems – with each database containing a common field to enable the systems to interlink.

The benefits – enhancing customer experience

Since going live, Mainchain has already been helping the company realise its vision of delivering a seamless view of the supply chain to staff and customers. Customers can now log onto a website – www.mainchain.net – and monitor their freight and logistics orders in real-time.

The team – Designertech’s .NET development specialists

Designertech’s .NET development team is skilled in presenting information from a host of internationally based disparate systems in a consolidated manner across the web. Their solution to Mainfreight’s problem was right on the leading edge of .NET technology and quickly became a Microsoft case study and provided the inspiration for the Microsoft Asynchronous Invocation Application Block for .NET.