Tradelink Provides Its Customers Greater Access to Intelligent Warehousing with SaaS on AWS

Founded in 1988, Tradelink is a leading provider of digital solutions for Hong Kong's trade and logistics industry — a multi-billion dollar vital economic sector. The business serves a diverse portfolio of over 50,000 customers, providing trade compliance and intelligent supply chain management solutions to meet the needs of local businesses of all sizes, in particular, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Among Tradelink's portfolio of intelligent supply chain management solutions is its digital warehousing product. The product offers modular capabilities tailored to warehouses of various sizes, including large-scale facilities with complex requirements.

This product was initially deployed in customers’ data centers or operated from Tradelink's own facility. While well-received by its enterprise customers, the company saw an opportunity for growth in offering a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of its digital warehousing solution.
Maintaining the solution’s rich functions and features, the transition to a SaaS model would streamline maintenance and updates, reduce costs, and pave the way for more cost-effective investment in further development. Furthermore, a cloud-based solution would be ideal for SMBs seeking a warehouse solution but lacking the resources to deploy their own hardware.
 

Tradelink built a modern, cloud-native SaaS solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The business leverages Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) for automated container administration, AWS Fargate for scalable compute resources, Application Load Balancer (ALB) for simplified security measures, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) as its cloud-native database solution.

Since its launch in 2021, Tradelink's SaaS-based digital warehousing product has witnessed steady growth in demand. Jack Lee, general manager, supply chain solutions at Tradelink, says, “Our SaaS product has been rapidly gaining popularity, especially among SMB customers. These businesses are eager to upgrade their IT capabilities and improve operational efficiency, taking advantage of specific government subsidies and funding programs designed to support SMBs.”

By developing its SaaS digital warehousing product on AWS, Tradelink has achieved cost reduction of 15 percent. For example, the company no longer needs to dedicate a team of up to six IT administrators to manage the underlying infrastructure. Says Lee, "With our digital warehousing SaaS solution on AWS, we have reduced deployment time for updates from hours to just 15 minutes. Additionally, user acceptance testing, which previously took weeks, can now be completed within days."

Tradelink can also handle unexpected spikes in warehouse activity seamlessly, without needing to deploy additional on-premises capacity. Lee says, "We can scale up the number of instances within minutes, which allows our customers to manage increased warehouse activity without any disruptions.”