Fleet Management

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Bourges, France

Fleet-tracking and statistics engine for last mile delivery of a French horticulture company.

SERVICES WE OFFERED

Ideation

UI/UX Design

Mobile Development

Backend Development

Frontend Development

Quality Assurance

Location Tracking

The requirement.

When Covid-19 surfaced, our client, a French horticulture company, was forced to quickly transition from a fully brick-and-mortar business model to online deliveries. The initial travel restrictions and regulations placed on businesses heavily troubled the nursery and they realised they needed a fleet management software to efficiently manage and track their deliveries.

The business’ early efforts at fulfilling online orders were described to us by their founder as being “a nightmare.” The process was entirely manual, paper-based, and heavily human resource intensive. It would take them the better part of 1 hour every morning to figure out an optimised route and then assign them to delivery partners. Additionally, it was impossible for the business to then keep track of each delivery, let alone estimate precisely the operational cost of each delivery, something completely new that they had to factor in.

Prior to this, they also never had provided an option to deliver to customers, considering their cargo was preciously delicate, they also purchased 8 electric scooters in lieu of their storefront which they gave up. These scooters had an Android based interface on the dashboard which we realised could be used to source various metrics that the scooter itself was collecting thus eradicating the need for external sensors.

Solving for Life on Land and more.

Every project that we take up is aligned to one or more of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

SDG #9

Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

SDG #11

Sustainable Cities & Communities

SDG #12

Responsible Consumption & Production

SDG #15

Life on Land

How we did it.

The TSP or travelling salesman problem coined in the year 1930 asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?" Route optimization that we hear about today is a generalisation of this very notion.

Our design team used this as the basis and focused on creating two simple yet effective flows to create trip routes and order management from a company perspective and then a 3-step mobile app for delivery partners to start a trip, go through stops and confirm a delivery. The entire design process was completed in a week’s time and handed over to the development team.

With a 4 weeks development target, we tested 9 different open-source route optimization libraries before finalising on RouteXL. We also integrated two Google Maps APIs - the Geolocation API and the Directions API, and the Maps SDK for future proofing. Being able to take a wise call on a “build vs integrate” choice allows for rapid software development without compromising on the proprietary nature of the software overall. We went live in precisely 6 weeks.

Point 1

We automated delivery planning with route optimization

Point 2

We developed a statistics engine

Point 3

We avoided the introduction of any extra hardware

Solving operational problems through technology

The main goal of the business was to completely pivot their operational process to something new. This is where the need for custom software development comes into play. Low-code and no-code platforms still involve a learning curve and cannot be as quick to solve a problem as a team of dedicated professionals following a systematic process can. Especially when it comes to something as crucial as saving a business from obsolescence.

Agile Development

An agile product development methodology was implemented to execute this project. Antarctica’s proprietary software development life cycle allows for multiple team members to work on multiple smaller parts of the project with an increased speed of iteration, rapid testing and implementation of results. On this specific project, we ideated with the client during the first week, produced designs in the second, completed simultaneous web and mobile development in 4 and deployed within 6 weeks, leaving a solid base for any future improvement.

Frosty the Penguin Selfie of Antarctica Global the Custom Software Development Company

The impact it had.

The Fleet Management tool that we implemented greatly simplified the company’s operational complexities through simple last-mile delivery management, by providing complete visibility and real-time updates to dispatchers and riders and by handling multi-point deliveries through route scheduling for faster deliveries.

A simple user interface is always at the core of our product experience. To the mass population, most apps tend to overwhelm you with a multitude of features, settings, and choices. We obsessed over taking away the complexity and delivering a seamless user experience, especially for a rider to focus on the road.

The software that we built and deployed saved 5 hours of employee time per week which was spent in the early days of the pandemic on route planning. The software also recouped 8 hours per week of employee time in collaboration of delivery confirmations with courier personnel and customers. Within 5 months of using the system, the company was able to track and fulfil more than 50 deliveries a day.

Overall the impact was considered so powerful and successful by the Founder that we went further and extended the web platform to also encompass additional features such as alerts in case of SLA breaches, various vehicle telematics data, which we pulled directly from the smart scooter and displayed on an intuitive online dashboard.

Fascinating times.

We feel a profound gratitude for having such projects come our way and that motivates us even more to beat all odds.

Our team

2 web & mobile developers, 2 designers, 2 testers & a PM.

6 weeks

We completed all this in a matter of just 6 weeks .

1 commitment

Our heart and soul from vision to deployment.

The tech stack we chose.

There is a reason why we set our standards so high: adaptability, efficiency, scalability.

Discover our tech stack

What the client had to say!

We have yet to experiment with various industries but we’re skilled enough to take risks and keep our good reputation going!

Considering a big change in our business model, I can say it was an outstanding change management through technology that Antarctica oversaw. The fact that our drivers found the app very easy and useful to complete deliveries made us confident that we had made the right decision in going ahead with this project. Thank you team Antarctica!

Chloé Foucher

Director & Horticulturist