Simple

Do One Thing And Do It Well

Stated as “The Unix Philosphy” Software should 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:

• Customer interactions
• Helpdesk
• Knowledge Base
• Workflows
• Dashboards and Analytics

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

Replayability

Events can be replayed partially. This makes it possible to restore past states of the application, which can be valuable for review and learning purposes. For example, trainees can be exposed to a tricky real-world situation to be able to manage real situations with ease.