Community
The challenges from the pandemic, the blockage of the Suez Canal by the M/V Ever Given, and world events, in general, have made it clear that improved coordination and data sharing are critical for global supply chains and logistics to function properly.
There has been discussion of the need for increased standards to improve and ease system integration. While we support and participate in these efforts, we feel that we as a community need to come together and build, improve and advance solutions quickly, collaboratively, and organically so that organizations of all sizes from all locations can contribute their insights and benefit from the community.
Global trade and logistics is not a new domain and there are many different open data standards for definitions and messaging. Our contribution is to offer an open platform for operational data systems to support enterprises and entities of the global trade and logistic community to organize, store and manage their supply chain and logistics data.
Introducing NXFolio
The NXFolio platform can serve as the basis for carrier and freight systems, community systems, order management systems, and other logistics and supply chain-related solutions as might be imagined.
The foundation of the platform is a relational data model that manages data on orders, invoices, payments, shipments, shipment routing, rates, administrative and shipping events, entities and entity relationships, associated documentation, addresses and contact details, and various necessary reference data. Riding atop this data model is a web-based application enabling the management of orders, payments, shipments, and entities. NTELX has successfully implemented this platform in various large enterprise solutions and now makes it available to the community.
“The supply chain and logistics community needs to come together and build, improve, and advance solutions quickly, based on common standards and without reinventing the wheel, so that trade systems can be more resilient and interoperable. The open source NXFolio platform can operationalize those standards.”
Capabilities of NXFolio
NXFolio is a software platform that captures and synchronizes data to facilitate trade and transport processes. It serves as the foundation for cargo community systems, transportation management systems, and other systems that accelerate trade processing, and transport operations, and enables transparency and traceability in supply chain/logistics environments. The standards-compliant, web-accessible architecture of the platform provides for rapid deployment and rollout, and the flexibility to meet local needs and evolving requirements. Using a flexible data architecture, NXFolio ensures that you can capture all relevant details of your supply chain and provides you with a platform for the integration of logistics data with trade partners and stakeholders.
Address Book
Shipment
Events
Orders
Invoice & Payments
The NXFolio Open Source project is releasing and enhancing the NXFolio software in several iterative releases.
The first release focuses on the large, comprehensive, relational database model that is the foundation for the software and data management, ensuring the data tables and updated initial reference data are deployable in the latest release of the open source database PostGres. The next phase will focus on the data integration engine known as NXFolio-X, providing legacy support for EDI messaging and custom data formats converted into standardized NXFolio XML. The web-based business application, the NXFolio user interface, will be the focus of the following release. Lastly, NTELX will incorporate the DCSA APIs into NXFolio, enhancing interoperability using this emerging open source standard that covers various APIs such as electronic bills of lading and track and trace.