Efficient Delivery of Packages

Major Technologies Used:

Challenges: This European client distributes newspapers, magazines, and parcels, with couriers crisscrossing the country daily to collect and deliver items. As the company grew, their paper-based system became inadequate, prompting them to seek a digital replacement. Unable to find a suitable off-the-shelf product, the client commissioned us to design and develop a custom solution tailored to their unique distribution processes.

Our Solution: To understand client operations, we began with in-depth field research, shadowing couriers on their daily routes. This firsthand experience informed our design process, leading to low-fidelity wireframes that were validated with the client before progressing to high-fidelity designs. Our comprehensive, secure, and compatible solution automated the client’s field force management. Job schedules are now pushed directly to couriers’ mobile devices, while a back-office portal allows real-time progress tracking and planning. Location data provides actionable insights for optimizing operations and work order management. This real-time information flow empowers back-office managers to manage more couriers per employee, optimize task documentation, eliminate paper usage, add/offer/rearrange tasks on the fly, and identify/address operational problems. The solution also facilitates quality control through graphical representations of problematic jobs, a chat module for direct communication with couriers, and real-time tracking of courier locations and routes. The results included increased efficiency through instant proof of delivery and streamlined invoicing, improved courier workflows by simplifying job management, and a future-proofed platform for the client continued digitization initiatives.