Background
After both the Truck Scale System and the Material Weighing System were live, a new challenge emerged at the organizational level:
- The customs authority (Bea Cukai) needed unified oversight of both systems — but the two platforms ran on completely separate databases.
- Giving auditors access to two different systems with two separate interfaces was not a workable solution.
- There was no consolidated view of material movement across sites, making inspections slow and dependent on IT involvement.
- Any data consolidation approach that required manual exports or batch jobs would introduce delays and risk going out of sync.
Solution
I designed a Unified Monitoring Platform using a Laravel Inertia.js + Vue.js stack, built specifically for the regulatory audience. The key architectural decision was to use Cross-Database Views (Linked Servers) in SQL Server — pulling live data from both production databases into a centralized read layer, without duplicating data or creating a separate ETL pipeline.
Implementation
The data federation layer was built using SQL Server Linked Servers and Cross-Database Views, which queried live data from both the Truck Scale and Material Weighing databases at read time. This meant the portal always reflected the current state of both systems without any scheduled batch jobs or manual refreshes.
The frontend was built with Inertia.js and Vue.js, delivering a single-page application feel — fast navigation, reactive data components, and no full page reloads. Vue.js components were developed to consolidate tonnage data and material identities from multiple sites into one coherent dashboard. Access to the portal was gated behind a strict authentication and authorization system to ensure only authorized regulatory personnel could view the data.
Impact
- Customs inspections that previously required navigating two separate systems could now be handled independently through a single web portal.
- Data from both production environments was always current and consistent — no batch delays, no manual consolidation.
- The engineering overhead of maintaining separate regulatory access pipelines was eliminated entirely.
- Audit readiness improved significantly, with all required records centralized, timestamped, and searchable from one interface.