Tracking every shipment of timber, from order to delivery
The client
Simmonds Lumber, a timber importer and wholesaler based in Rosehill, NSW.
The challenge
Imported timber runs on long lead times. An order placed with an overseas supplier becomes a shipment that may be weeks or months in transit before it reaches a yard. The business needs to know at any moment what is ordered, what is in transit and when it will arrive — by supplier, and laid out across a calendar rather than a list.
ShipTrack does that job, and it is mission critical: when it is down, nobody can see where the stock is.
The solution
ShipTrack is a Plone application. Each shipment is a delivery record, and a calendar view shows what is due to arrive, filtered by supplier.
We support and maintain it under annual agreements — monitoring the application around the clock, responding to priority-one incidents within the hour, applying Plone security patches within 24 hours of release, and keeping configuration in version control so changes were repeatable.
We also enhanced it. The largest piece was performance: the calendar was loading around 14,000 objects for every supplier query and taking seconds to answer. We tuned the object cache so the working set stayed in memory and changed how the view retrieved records, so planners could move through the calendar at speed.
We were straight about the ceiling, too. Plone is built for large unstructured content rather than high volumes of small records, and we said plainly that tuning would take the system a long way but never as far as a rewrite would. The client chose to keep it and invest where it was strong.
The outcome
ShipTrack is the business’s window on its inbound stock — kept fast, patched and available, without a rebuild. After the 2019 renewal Simmonds brought support back in-house, with the system still doing the job it was bought to do.
What this involved
Shipments held as delivery records in Plone, with a calendar view of expected arrivals filtered by supplier
Calendar performance: a supplier query was loading around 14,000 objects, so the object cache was tuned to hold the working set and the view changed to stop fetching them all
Monitored around the clock with priority-one response inside the hour, and Plone security patches applied within 24 hours of release
Configuration under version control, so an environment could be rebuilt rather than hand-repaired