Design Philosophy

Modern Software cannot be seen as standalone solutions for a problem. To gain real benefits from digital tools, tight integration is essential.

This ideal is a core principle in the development of raccoon dispatch software. Instead of reinventing the wheel by implementing services where off-the-shelf tooling exists, we focus on the parts, that actually distinguish bike messenger companies from other companies.

The primary selling point of bike messengers is speed, most orders are completed within a few hours. Compared to most other companies, where orders take days or weeks to complete, this is one or several orders of magnitude faster.

In traditional businesses orders are usually managed by some form of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. This software helps in making sure that human and other needed resources are at the right time at the right place for orders to be fulfilled on time. This is exactly what dispatch software is used for. But the short timeframes in the bike messenger delivery business make it hard to use off-the-shelf ERP software, which is aimed at order run times of days, weeks or even more.

Apart from that, bike messenger companies are very similar to many other businesses. There are customers and interactions to be managed, shifts to be planned, salaries to be paid, invoices to be sent out, and payments be checked. For all this, off-the-shelf ERP, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), Accounting and other software can be used.

Using off-the-shelf software brings many benefits. The features are far more elaborate as can be developed only for the bike delivery market:

We currently integrate with EspoCRM, because its flexibility and simplicity seems a good fit for the messenger business.