Flexible And Simple

One of the core propositions of most bike messenger companies is flexibility in delivery. Unlike postal services, there are little limits in size, weight, time-frames, fragility, and so on. If it can be transported with a bike it is usually delivered.

We are convinced that software should reflect and support core business values.

Configuration Flexibility

Raccoon is designed to be very unopinioned. It can easily be configured to match personal preferences or company specific processes and needs.

Shipments are grouped in lanes. Lanes can be riders or groups of shipments with similar properties (“large and heavy”, " time critical", etc). There can be as many lanes as needed and the lanes can be organized freely.

Shipments and orders have no mandatory fields. This enables agents to fill in information in the order they receive them from the customers. Time-critical shipments can be dispatched with minimal information filled in and completed later.

Mandatory fields or rules for fields and be flexibly defined with the build in business rule engine.

Do One Thing And Do It Well

In many businesses orders are managed by some form of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. This software helps in making sure that the human and other necessary 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 to 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 than 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.

Integration

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.