The client

Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Texas, BNSF Logistics is a technology and people-driven third-party logistics company providing smart, creative supply chain solutions. With close to $1 billion in annual revenue, BNSF Logistics is a market leader in the 3PL space and is focused on a digital-first future.

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The challenge

BNSF Logistics was challenged with an ambitious product roadmap, and partnered with Transcenda to help accelerate their development capabilities. Having not previously partnered with an external engineering agency, BNSF Logistics was worried about quality, a third party's ability to integrate and work with their existing team, security and confidentiality. At the same time, they wanted a partner who could help them ramp up quickly and immediately start tackling projects within their roadmap while the internal team continued working on projects that were already planned.

As for specific projects, BNSF Logistics was interested in building out functionality related to the management and customer experience around booking non-standard loads for shipping, including Rail, Wind and Intermodal.

One of the largest project challenges was ensuring the delivery of new features in a timely manner while contributing to the overall platform stability and performance improvements. Considering the legacy code and integrations, planning the work while also working with quite a bit of unknown every sprint took considerable expertise and effort by both teams.

One of the first initiatives Transcenda introduced was building the end-to-end QA automation framework that would empower a high level of quality, without slowing down the team velocity and ensuring new features would not break any of the existing parts of the system.
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Balancing competing business priorities and ensuring alignment toward common business goals was another challenge Transcenda faced when considering functionality and technical trade-offs. The team overcame this through daily communication with product and logistics managers, regular bi-weekly sessions with the executive team and close alignment with engineering. The time investment and development approach were worth the effort, and Transcenda successfully delivered solutions that created measurable business outcomes and value for BNSF Logistics.