Monitor security and compliance throughout a shipments’ journey by setting up custom zones, which alert you when your truck enters, exits, or stops in a custom-defined area. It helps in keeping your trucks out of high-risk areas that could result in product damage or delays

This was a very generic feature used in many creative ways to solve a different subset of problems in logistics and helped during Covid-19 as well.

Some of the creative use-cases were

• Users can look at the Network Congestion map and customize a zone around the areas with longer wait times and get alerts when a truck stops there
• Identify areas affected by COVID-19 and customize zones with a fixed radius around these areas to be notified when a truck deviates or stops in this area
• Using Isochrone as a geofence type, the users can get notified when the truck is about to reach its destination
• Users can choose to get notified when the truck crosses a given landmark to prepare for the arrival
• For loads carrying altitude-sensitive materials, users can create a custom zone around areas of certain altitudes. This way the user will be notified and can have their driver take an alternate route

Upon seeing the core genericity of this requirement, I had to design a system that enabled users to leverage the feature for a multitude of use-cases. I researched several geospatial databases like PostGIS, Elasticsearch Geo, ESRI, H3 for supporting geo-hashing and geospatial query capabilities. Once the architecture was finalized, I mentored a colleague to implement the same from scratch and released it to production within a month.

This was a distinguishing feature that impressed multiple stakeholders and eventually got transitioned into the Premium features segment. This also helped the Sales team to upsell packages to customers, bringing in higher revenue to the company.