With the last few years being difficult for companies to adjust to ever changing government imposed restrictions on delivery and services, businesses have had to change their operations and move from a more traditional model to adopting new technologies and platforms. If you take networks of restaurants for example, before 2020 more of their business was conducted in house, if you look forward 2 years later to 2022 a lot of the same companies see a larger % of revenue from delivery services. With all this in mind, it makes sense for companies to build their own technology solutions. Reasons for this include avoiding large aggregator fees, more control of their technology and their data, and also the value of their business increases as they own their own technology in house.
This being said, what are the ways that companies can build and own their technology? The first would be custom development. Companies can either in house or outsource their development of their customer ordering apps, operations systems and driver management software. This downside to this is long buildout times, increased manpower and of course higher cost. The alternative is they can adopt open source software. ‘Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance’.
Given the volume of delivery that happens every day across the globe, the amount of companies that are adopting technology to help their customers order or request services, to help themselves manage their operations and to help their drivers conduct deliveries more efficiently, is increasing. This means that we are also seeing open source software that companies are adopting, this is because of the tested and proven software and the fact that it is free to set up and quick to get to market.
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, open source software for delivery companies is free and easy to work with. But what are the actual benefits?
Cost Effective - Open source hyperlocal technology is free. You can avoid paying large license fees, and in comparison to custom developed, its worlds apart.
Access To A Community - As open source delivery software is used by developers and businesses all across the world, you will have access to a whole community that are all geared around the same technology and typically the same or similar use cases. This is beneficial for you as any questions, insights and improvements can be shared and learnt from.
Secure Software - As mentioned in the last points, as multiple developers are using, improving and suggesting new features, the software naturally becomes more secure as bugs and security vulnerabilities are consistently identified and patched.
Ownership & Transparency - Open source means you own the source code. With this concept, it shows complete transparency and ability for developers to see the code end to end and not be hit with any surprises further down the line.
Quicker to Launch - As most open source software is mature and usually has the bells and whistles you need, only small configures or custom development are required, allowing you to get your solution and business to market faster.
Firstly define your requirement for software. For example, if you are a company conducting hyper local delivery or services, you may be looking for a solution to allow your customers to easily order your products, track the delivery and leave tips and ratings all in one place. If you then want to own the technology, you can start to look for open source software that fulfills your needs. Our suggestion would be to select open source software that has your requirements but can also be easily integrated into other systems that you need in order to automate as much of your operations and processes as possible.
Fleetbase wants to help businesses that are conducting hyperlocal delivery and hyperlocal services and with that we are providing open source software to automate as much of the operational process as possible.
🏪 Introducing Storefront
With covid, the demand for hyperlocal services and apps have increased to an all time high. This is when we started receiving requests for these types of development services from local restaurants, bars, and various vendors. Storefront is the oper source solution we designed for this.
We wanted to make it easy for businesses to build, publish and launch their own app quickly and with all the features needed for them to execute all types of delivery and hyperlocal services.
✨ Features ✨
Contact us at hello@fleetbase.io to learn more about logistics developer tools and to see how Fleetbase can help you manage your hyperlocal operations process and expedite the build out of new systems and applications.
