Zonamerica is the company that operates the park located in the Free Trade Zone of Montevideo, Uruguay, and is in charge of providing the infrastructure and services for companies to settle and develop their business there. An essential service provided by Zonamerica is the logistics and control support for goods entering and leaving the park. Therefore, systematizing and performing more and better customer inventory controls is a vital task. 

For this purpose, Zonamerica used to rely on a system that, due to continuous technological changes, was not capable of meeting all the current needs of the company. Thus, with the support of Montevideo Teleport, a new system was designed from scratch, based on end-users’ requirements. Among other things, the new project was intended to improve the system’s front end to make it totally web-based, allow access from different places through token validation, and provide the operation with higher agility and dynamism, while at the same time adding more functionality. The option to develop this new system was clear: GeneXus. Mainly because the purpose was also to develop software enabling the protection of intellectual property and know-how, to be later sold to other free trade zones. 

The task, however, was not altogether simple, since it was necessary to consolidate it with a previous model and migrate all the valuable information generated over more than 13 years to a different data format. The solution was developed using patterns, which allowed the rapid creation of a model in its initial stage. A first analysis and survey stage was carried out with the users, and regular validation meetings with end-users were held. This feedback led to prototyping, testing and finally implementing the solution. 

“The solution supports the management and operation of Zonamerica’s  inventory control and management, having requirements imposed by the National Free Trade Zone and Customs Office. It is connected with the “Lucía” system in Customs (also developed with GeneXus technology by Concepto company), and all park customers and logistics operators must declare the movements of goods to be performed, as well as keep their stocks in the system updated,” explained Fernanda Eiriz, Zonamerica’s software engineer manager.

This is how Lorenzo was born, a solution which - besides its simple accessibility - provides a load balance among the three application servers on which it works, which not only lightens the load on each of them, but also allows for continuous operation in the event of failure of any of them. Likewise, the solution makes it possible to keep the customer’s information and stocks under control, perform inventory audits, and be able to duly present the information before Customs. 

“Finally, all ideas and requirements previously presented by end-users were successfully implemented, and some mechanisms that used to be manual were automated, such as truck scale data recording, or the printing of the ticket that’s given to the truck driver when entering the park,” assured Eiriz.