A large US-based airline was struggling to keep track of their cargo items on a daily basis. The lack of real-time tracking had led to missed critical time thresholds, causing revenue loss for the airline and damaging their brand value. The ramp agents were forced to operate on a "what you see is what you get" basis, relying only on information from the departure staging guide or the items present at the gates. The airline was in dire need of a solution that could provide real-time status updates for their cargo items.

To address this complex issue, TCG Digital followed a business-first, design thinking-based approach. The team conducted extensive field studies across 7 hub airports in the US, spending considerable time with ramp personnel and supervisors in the cargo department. They then proceeded with ideation, prototyping, and testing for a month to design a customer experience and lay new business processes. The team prioritized and customized requirements, rapidly built and deployed the final product with the most relevant features, and continually fine-tuned the solution through a feedback-based system.

The result? The Cargo Dashboard, a software product with a plethora of features that revolutionized the cargo department’s operations with the following features:

• Scanner apps to scan cargo items and maintain scan history
• Configurable scan points to let the business decide touch points across which they want cargo tracking
• Real-time monitoring
• Real-time alerts
• Rule-based engine
• Visual tracking

To ensure the product’s success, TCG Digital designed a robust system with the following architectural goals:

• Use responsive design for unified desktop and mobile experience
• Create, expose or consume micro-service based APIs
• Create real-time alerts in the application for user notifications

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