Smart technology keeps client shipments, expenses in check
TO THE RESCUE
Jim Colvin, the CEO of Urban Dispatch Logistics Inc., saw a market opportunity and went for it.
“There’s a chasm between the larger overnight couriers’ sophisticated delivery solutions – usually based on a central ‘hub and spoke’ model - and the other side of the equation: what is available from the same-day local couriers,” he says. “There aren’t many courier technology solutions out there that provide customercentric features, and those that do exist are expensive to the local courier market.”
Mr. Colvin says when his new management team was working to increase Urban Dispatch’s capabilities and growth potential, they examined the core technologies employed by the company to deliver its integrated, web-based courier services to clients. “We ended up doing a complete rewrite of the systems – ShipManager and Pipeline,” he says.
ShipManager is Urban Dispatch’s web-based courier management solution. Through this “business process outsourcing” tool, the company’s clients can free themselves of managing their courier services and tracking packages.
“The courier portion of ShipManager is table stakes,” says Mr. Colvin. “Everything else we do eliminates the hassle because it allows companies to outsource the entire courier and tracking process to us, through one solution, regardless of the nature of the package or its ultimate destination.”
Urban Dispatch clients such as Burnet, Duckworth & Palmer and First Calgary Savings have no IT requirements other than a desktop set-up with a web browser. This saves a company both time and money, according to Mr. Colvin.
He says companies save on the cost of managing their courier services internally, with no manual waybills, duplicated effort or complicated rules to follow. As well, time is saved that would normally be spent in manual ordering processes, tracking, interacting with the mailroom and other activities associated with getting a package to its destination.
“We offer companies one stop in meeting their courier needs,” says Mr. Colvin, adding that Urban Dispatch keeps it simple with one phone number to call if there’s a problem, one web-based interface to manage and one daily invoice to allow companies to track courier expenses.
He says this allows his clients to avoid having to figure out which courier to use for which type of delivery, as well as the hassle of chasing down packages in a non-streamlined environment.
“We are an aggregator of the couriers and have created a pool of different courier services to draw from,” says Mr. Colvin. “That way, we can choose the right courier for their job and dispatch it right away. And by utilizing a network of existing carrier companies in each urban centre, we are able to optimize the existing local capacity rather than putting more vehicles on the road. This reduces carbon emissions and additional traffic congestion.”
From there, tracking a package can be a breeze. “Our technology solution enables our customers to track dispatches from their desktops. The status of a delivery is regularly refreshed by the individual courier companies. This pure visibility – through our dashboard – goes right from pickup to delivery.”
“We have over 150 clients, primarily based in Alberta. We’re expanding into Vancouver next, then Toronto and Montreal over the next 12 months, and into the United States within 24 to 36 months,” says Mr. Colvin.
Pipeline is another of Urban Dispatch’s solutions. It operates wirelessly, on Windows- based hand-held devices, and is used to manage wholesale warehouse and mobile distribution.
Again, this technology is web-based, allowing customers to use third party carriers, yet still follow the progress of each product remotely as it makes its way from the distribution centre to its ultimate destination. All this, regardless of numerous changes in custody.
Pipeline is used by Acculogix Distribution Services, a joint venture distribution services company that is 50 per cent owned by Jim Pattison’s News Group Canada, to manage the distribution of over 100 million magazines a year in Western Canada.
“They were our beta contract and helped us develop this solution based on their own business processes,” says Mr. Colvin. “We’ve saved them a lot of money.”
---
TO READ THE FULL REPORT AS IT APPEARED IN THE GLOBE AND MAIL, PLEASE CLICK ON THE ATTACHED PDF >
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| july7deliverables.pdf | 830.63 KB |