CROAMIS – Cargo Management Reimagined for the Aviation Industry

CROAMIS (Cargo Reservations, Operations, Accounting, and Management Information System) is a cutting-edge, end-to-end cargo management solution built specifically for the aviation sector. Developed through a strategic co-funded partnership between Wipro Technologies and Qatar Airways, CROAMIS aims to digitize and streamline every core aspect of air cargo operations.

Overview:

CROAMIS is designed to meet the needs of airlines, ground handling agents, freight forwarders, and revenue accounting departments, CROAMIS delivers robust functionality with an emphasis on modularity, customization, and scalability. CROAMIS is offered in both On-Premise and SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) models, giving enterprises the freedom to choose based on infrastructure, compliance, and operational strategy. UX need to meet aviation industry standards without compromising the workflow precision or the branding guideline.

*Due to legal limitation and privacy policies, I could not share all the screen or the workflow materials, instead I used the public pages to show the great features this app has, so bare with me.

Goals and Objectives

• Design an intuitive, efficient experience for users managing high-volume cargo data
• Enable fast and accurate decision-making for airlines, ground handling staff, and freight forwarders
• Support a wide range of users with customizable UI, multilingual access, and responsive design
• Maintain visual consistency and reduce cognitive load across a massive system with over 300 unique screens

Proposed Solution

• Use dynamic grid base UI to give excel like look and feel with optimised filters & sorting to deal with high-volume workflows and also to optimise learning curve.
• Smart LOV(List Of Values) components, inline edits and keyboard-first design to improve efficiency and reduce cross application dependencies.
• Design a custom themes engine that seamlessly enhances/updates look and feel as per client’s need and branding guidelines without the need for further UI development.

My Contributions

As a key member of the UX team, I picked multiple role during the course of the project… I picked UX Architect during the initial stages of the project took the responsibility of user research, workflow analysis, demos, wireframing and visual design. Later I switched to UI Architect role to foresee UI development and to set standards and guidelines. I also played a bit of research to help the deployment team to deploy/package. Below is a list of contribution I could do to CROAMIS…

• Designing and implementing reusable UI components using jqGrid and jQuery
• Creating dynamic LOV components for efficient data selection and user interaction
• Implementing theme customization using LESS and SVG for scalable visuals
• Enhancing performance through optimized JSON data handling
• Participating in architecture planning to ensure scalability and modularity
• Coordinating with backend teams to define RESTful API contracts

UX Design Strategy

This being a massive project, we broke the process of problem solving into smaller chunks and build our screen on top of them. The first issue that needs care is our user familiarity with Microsoft Excel, which they use for most of their daily operation. So we decided to evaluate and design an excel/spreadsheet like UI for the users dealing with high-volume data because a conventional click-thru web interface may not work. The UI is supposed to mimic the features of excel, which helps the users’s become productive faster. We code named it “CRUD Table“, which has these key features listed below

• Inline editing: Like the Excel Sheet, this grid look and feels like a spreadsheet where you use manipulate data first and finally hit save button to update data. CRUD (create, read, update and delete) operations are done like excel and user will shelve save/discard operation for later.
• Keyboard navigation: To mimic Excel, you should get the keyboard interaction right. Most of the CRUD operation can be done just using keyboard along with some major actions like save etc. And also there is a customisation provided to maximum convienence.
• Frozen columns: Most table interfaces on web application has a limitation of header hiding after scrolling, but for CROAMIS we designed table that can be customised to have some columns or rows frozen for maximum usability.
• Persistent filters and views: One other issue that we identified in our user research is the persistence! This being a web app, we took extra care to maintain data and view persistence so that the view and data shows up.

Second biggest challenges is usage of multiple applications to achieve single operation like booking a consignment… as users needs to juggle between multiple sheets of excel, sometime even printed sheet. So we developed a brand new UI component, that we call “LOV” aka “List Of Values” which helps users get airport code, currency, city and every relevant information with out leaving screen, it even fills them in relevant fields. This is one of the benchmark innovation in this project. Listed below are the highlights of this groundbreaking component.

• Autocomplete with Contextual Metadata: The user needs to input an airport code but he/she know only the name of the airport of the city, with the help of this LOV he don’t have to guess or refer other sheet to get it right the first time around. This component is customisable so depending on the need, more fields can be added to assist faster turnaround.
• Auto-fill of Related Fields: This being a customisable component it could even do multi field auto-fill, which eliminates multiple field entries if they are relevant. This auto-fill option also eliminates human error by a huge margin.
• Eliminates Cross App Dependencies: As this component can be customised as per workflow needs, it eliminates need for second sheet or app, which also enhances consistencies.

CROAMIS is a data heavy app, so validation also plays a big role. Traditional validation will add extra effort so we created an all new system that lists the errors in a modal like overlay. This system allows the users to understand the issue and fix them all in one shot, this also saves effort.

Key Learnings

Working on CROAMIS exposed me to enterprise-scale application development, architectural decision-making, and the importance of clean code and scalable frameworks. The complexity of the application sharpened my problem-solving skills, especially in UX optimization, large data handling and component-based architecture in legacy tech stacks. I also learned how to manage a large team that mostly comprises of young minds filled with eagerness to learn and shine. Working with middle-east client also exposed me to some cultural and technical awareness.

This is my SAAS project so this experience will definitely help me in a longer run. Overall I had so much fun developing UX from ground up, meet few great minds from both clients side and also from Wipro side and exposed to challenges that sharpened me, all of which I will take forever. Now my part here is over and the project is moved to maintenance phase, its time to transfer knowledge gained to the support team and move on. Hopefully CROAMIS gets far more adaptation and shines like a shining star.