NSBS - Shipment Tracking and Report Generation

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Case Study 1: Shipment Tracking and Report Generation

A small business wants to be able to extract and save detailed shipment tracking information from it's major carrier websites onto its own proprietary database. The list of carriers include UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS. Currently, the company manually looks up tracking numbers online on each carrier's website. The company would like to extract the data on a periodic basis and save it to their database. They intend to use the data for the following purposes:

	1.		Maintain a detailed history of all shipping transactions on their database
	2.		Quickly lookup a specific customer's shipment information log
	3.		Generate customized reports based on this data (i.e. tracking time from order receipt to fulfillment, package pickup until delivery to customer)

The Customer Table contains detailed information about customers (data is fictional)

The Deliveries Table contains all shipment information for all customers

A sample tracking data to be retrieved from the UPS website

Newbie scripts were developed to read input files, one for each carrier, that contains a list of tracking numbers.

Newbie automates the extraction of the data from the websites and saves them directly into the Tracking Table

Snapshot report generated from
the company's database