Why should businesses outsource Delivery Management?

Our hypothesis is:

Uber, Postmates, Instacart, Washio, and others in the last few years have created pretty robust and well-managed platforms for managing deliveries and field staff. There is a clear value proposition for individual businesses engaged in service and delivery businesses to leverage similar technology. The hypothesis that we are working off is that every business currently managing home deliveries or providing off-site services through the field staff will be using this digital infrastructure to manage deliveries soon. To that effect, Tookan provides an off-the-shelf platform generalized for on-demand businesses to efficiently manage the deliveries and engage with their customers without the hassle of building or managing this digital infrastructure.

The idea for Tookan has been brewing for a while now. We have been working in the general On-Demand space for more than 2 years now, and all the while we were seeing a clear demand among businesses to provide an efficient Uber-like delivery management solution. More on this background later but let’s focus on the hypothesis and the problem or opportunity as you might visualize it to see if we are a potential fit for each other.

Problem/Opportunity

Managing a delivery business or a mobile workforce can be difficult operationally. The good thing is that your competitors if they don’t happen to be the startups that are based on this digital infrastructure will also hold the same views. The problem is that these platforms are disrupting the industry value chain across verticals. The opportunity is if you can outsource the management of this digital infrastructure and couple it with your knowledge of the local market, loyal customers it’s difficult for your competitors to compete with you. In such a case you are looking at a steady stream of revenue from an expanded customer base and efficient management of deliveries.

Solution

The IP of these platforms lies in both the product and the processes. Processes help in the evolution of the product over time ensuring that the work gets done at scale. If you have just started managing the fleet or have manual processes built around excel sheets you need to embrace both the product and new processes around delivery management.

There are 2 possible approaches to solve this –

First is outsourcing all the deliveries to another delivery service provider. This reduces the margins and might make your delivery business unviable.
Embracing a cloud-based off-the-shelf solution that allows you to keep managing your own drivers efficiently and provide a satisfying customer experience ensuring independence, efficiency, and ROI because you weren’t required to invest in building that product and related processes.

What is Tookan?

Tookan offers you the choice of a second option. It is an off-the-shelf Delivery Management Solution to schedule, dispatch, and track your fleet, and interact with the customers.

3 core components include –

A web-based dashboard that enables live tracking of the fleet and allows you to streamline your operations by centralizing the dispatching, allocation, and scheduling of jobs/deliveries while consolidating all the data and analytics in one place.
Native mobile app for your fleet/runners/drivers that automatically notifies them of a new job in real-time, makes it easy to interact with your customers, find directions, and complete jobs.
Customer side interaction widget that notifies them at the key points of the transaction and allows them to track the delivery or service provider from the mobile phone.

We have already built the core components over the last 6 months in stealth mode. Coming back to the background in On-Demand technology that I mentioned earlier and has guided Tookan’s development, we have a product called NextJuggernaut that helps entrepreneurs create On-Demand experiences and another SAAS-based product called TaxiHawk that’s already powering ground transportation business all over the world. So the core technology has already been tested in custom environments in products such as Jugnoo, BiteKite, Smokeio, Vizavoo, etc.

Before I forget, let me end with mentioning the pricing model that we are going to use for Tookan over the next few months. As you might have noticed there is no separate pricing page in the current sitemap. This is because we have decided that we are going to keep the platform completely free for the first 5 customers. (We are going to be choosy, of course 🙂 ). So if you are serious about enabling deliveries in your enterprise get in touch and we will get right back to you for a quick consultation session.