Today we would like to invite you to take a look at the history of cooperation between Carousel – the European leader in the logistics industry and Hublock – an ambitious and very talented startup that has been creating IT solutions for logistics.
Carousel is a logistics group, operating in Europe from the very north in Finland to the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea. It provides transportation services in a specific niche – where critical time delivery in the medical, automotive and agricultural branches is concerned.
Hublock’s history begins with more than 25 years of experience in logistics and working with domestic and international drivers. 6 years ago, our logistician Maciek met with Mikolaj – a guru of modern IT solutions, and from this meeting Hublock – an advanced platform for logisticians and drivers – was born.
5 years ago, one of Carousel’s main customers – a major player in the healthcare industry, started to demand from their logistics companies the ability to track his shipments in real time and to determine the exact time of delivery (the magic ETA – or Estimated Arrival Time). Hublock with its solutions and ideas became Carousel’s way of solving this challenge.
Let’s explain it with an example. Have you ever waited for a courier at home or at work and missed him …. because you had to leave for a while? Or maybe it happened to you to receive the courier on the run from the shower? Probably yes. And probably it’s not a tragedy when it concerns your single, private parcel.
Now imagine that you are waiting for the delivery of hundreds of packages a day and that in the boxes there are no new shoes for you, but there are spare parts needed to repair the hospital’s CT and MRI machines. In such a situation, not only are you waiting, but also technicians repairing the equipment, medical staff, and patients in hospitals…
What can make this waiting process as simple as possible, shorten it and allow for good planning? This is where the need for a software solution comes in, one that makes our ETAs precise and easily accessible to each party in the delivery process.
After 8 months of developers’ work Hublock got the green light to lead a presentation about the platform’s capabilities, and the implementation of the first working account for Carousel happened just a few weeks later in Poland.
Not everything worked perfectly right away. The biggest problem, after the implementation, turned out to be … Ireland and its wilderness. Brave drivers, delivering packages to places where no one would dream to get by car, mysteriously disappeared from the Hublock radar.
The problem turned out to be the geolocation plug-in and … the 3G network still bravely “racing” in Ireland.
During the development of this plugin, it became necessary to introduce an off-line mode, i.e. a time when drivers could update or complete their tasks despite being out of range of the gsm network.
After necessary adjustments deliveries in Ireland ceased to pose a problem.
Hublock also began to introduce brand new features to the app, “tailor-made” specifically for Carousel, for example:
Hublock’s platform began serving not only Poland and Ireland, but also Germany, Spain, Portugal.
After the first experiences, it was clear how to:
The whole implementation began to take literally a few days!
Carousel client works with more than 150 logistics companies around the world on a daily basis. In a worst-case scenario, he has to cooperate with more than 150 track and trace systems. And, of course, additionally with a system developed by Hublock.
The easiest way to solve this would be to get all his supply chain players to switch to the Hublock platform, which is certainly a dream for Carousel and Hublock. However, it is known that in business, such moves do not happen quickly.
And so Carousel shares delivery time information from Hublock with the his client application dedicated for technicians. Any technician needing information on the exact time of package delivery gets the url and thanks to it can see the entire delivery process directly on Hublock’s map.
The task has been fully completed: