How I built small web apps to improve internal processes and operations at transportation company.

In addition to freelance web design and development, I manage operations and technology at my family's transportation business, where I've used my development background to build small web tools to be used internally to increase operational efficiency.

One tool in particular that has made a huge impact is the Quote Calculator. This tool has allowed us to provide more accurate quotes to our customers by using data to estimate expenses and automation to calculate service costs.

Using APIs to gather data and estimate expenses

For a brief context, at Gordon Driveaway, we move large commercial vehicles from point A to point B. Think, vacuum trucks, fire trucks, etc. What's unique about this business is that the vehicles are driven, not hauled, from 100s to 1000s of miles across the country.

Before the introduction of the Quote Calculator, order quotes were "guessimated" using information from previous orders, but this was obviously a flawed system because a lot could vary from order to order, such as current fuel costs, miles per gallon of each vehicle, toll prices, etc.

To more accurately estimate expenses for each order, I implemented a few different APIs to pull the data I needed based on the vehicle type and trip route.

By inputting the coordinates of the start and stop locations, the Here Routing API returns a trip route along with the total mileage and total toll cost, if any. The route is then visualized on the map.

Once the route has been returned, I wrote functions to pull in the current U.S fuel prices (updated weekly) and use the route mileage provided by the Here API to calculate an estimated total fuel cost for the order.

Fuel is the largest expense, so being able to estimate the fuel costs more effectively has been a game-changer.

The route is also used to determine if any permits are needed, depending on which states are being traveled through. Any required permits are added to the expense total.

All the field values can be manually adjusted if the automated calculations need editing.

What's next?

The Quote Calculator was just one example of how I've been able to utilize my development background to solve real problems and see the difference my solutions can make in day-to-day processes.

It's been really rewarding to be able to build things that make a difference. Even if that difference is just saving some extra time that would rather be spent elsewhere.

I look forward to building more little apps to help people and other businesses solve their unique problems.