Show HN: Onfleet, local delivery logistics SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Onfleet, local delivery logistics SaaS

onfleet.com

55 pointscalvintennant28 comments

If you're interested in integrating with Onfleet's API, or just want to play around, I wrote a pretty comprehensive wrapper (there are a few things missing, but it's already running in production code). Hope it's helpful! Contributions welcome. :)

https://github.com/lionheart/python-onfleet

Thanks for the python wrapper Dan! That was passed around the office a couple weeks ago, we were all quite happy to see it.

You're welcome! That's so cool to hear. If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know.

That logo looks similar to the Visual Studio 2010 one:

http://imgur.com/9BB0B3w

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Visual+Studio+2010+Logo...

I used this product while it was called Trak. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to build a service with a delivery component. Their mobile apps work pretty well and drivers need little to no training to use them. The dashboard is very useful when you're at low volumes, and they have a nice API for automating things when the time comes.

My only complaint is a driver cannot be "active" on more than one order at once. That is, if a driver is making a delivery to two people from one origin (like a restaurant), only the first customer will receive the tracking link and live updates. The second customer will receive it after the first delivery is complete, but in a densely populated area, there is little value to knowing where your order is when it is already almost to you.

That's a pretty small complaint that they'll probably address in the future if it is worthwhile, so I wouldn't let that deter you if you're using a crappy homegrown management system and want something better.

Hey, Ryan. Thanks for the kind words!

David, here, CTO & Co-founder at Onfleet. We're quite busy on a number of improvements touching on some of your points.

We released dynamic filtering based on delay time recently which is our first foray into exception-driven dispatching for large volume customers. There's a lot more to come here!

While we think of tasks as the smallest atomic unit of work for a driver -- and so we like to imagine that at most one can be active for a given driver at once -- we're rolling out dependencies soon and will be exposing configurable notifications that support these cases.

Additionally, the concept you mention around exposing ETAs for future but inactive tasks is in the pipeline. The biggest challenges here are around privacy for the driver and other customers and we'll be sure to put a lot of consideration into balancing visibility and privacy.

Often, in the on-demand space, it's common to see companies which expose the driver's location to a customer as they make deliveries to other customers. We do want to allow this feature but it's essential for us that alternatives which better protect customer information are available.

Now that's what I call selling pickaxes!

I thought they were going to do the pickup/delivery for me. Is there a service that does that? Why not?

The Postmates API could probably help with that ;)

The Postmates API is certainly an option for businesses.

Often, however, it's quite expensive. Our customers save a significant amount of money by executing deliveries first-party or by delegating to a partner organization.

Additionally, we strive to give businesses complete control of their branding and of the recipient experience even while delegating tasks to another organization. For example, we offer a quite customizable recipient tracking page and SMS and voice proxying to hide customer and driver phone numbers. There are more details about these features on the features page (https://onfleet.com/features) and sprinkled through our API docs but feel free to reach out if you have any questions: http://docs.onfleet.com/

Hey, flatjaf. We don't offer first-party delivery but we do allow you to delegate work to "executor" organizations through our connections feature. For example, Meadow uses this feature to assign tasks to their partner dispensaries. Likewise, this can be used to work seamlessly with third-party executors like couriers.

Is your name a play off the slang term "On Fleek"?

More of a happy accident, I guess. I don't think we realized "on fleek" was a thing until long after we had the domain.

I sent a request for a demo. Company was listed as To Be Named. Would really like to check you guys out. You can possibly solve a big problem for us.

Now all we need is a company called "Eyebrows" to use this. Then you'll have Eyebrows on Fleet :)

I wish my local meat delivery folks would use a service like this. Would make it much easier to coordinate with the drivers.

Put them in touch with us :)

contact@onfleet.com

I wasn't able to tell from the website but I'm assuming it uses a phone that your delivery person has for GPS tracking, signature capture,... and feeds the info realtime to a website that operators can watch.

That's right. Check out our features page for details on the driver apps and the other facets of the product: https://onfleet.com/features

Congrats Mikel and crew!

Thanks Tim!

Hard to ascertain - does this service provide automated route recommendations? via some path finding optimization?

It will in a few weeks!

Are you going to support routing rules like preferring right hand turns? If so, we should talk.

This is something we will eventually support, absolutely, but our first release won't include this as a configurable option. That being said, we plan on making travel restrictions a first-class setting soon after launch. Feel free to email me directly if you wanna chat some more :)

Congrats to Mikel and the team - love the product!

Should have gone with "Onfleek".

Otherwise, nice.

You don't think we can hop on the momentum there? "This craft ice cream delivered on-demand to my door is #onfleet".

And thanks :)

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