PartRunner, AWS, and HyperTrack Partner to Close the Technology Gaps in Big & Bulky Delivery

The growth in the big and bulky space introduces key problems to OEMs and retailers. Customer expectations for on-demand experiences and a lack of workers to satisfy just in time requirements. Small delivery providers lack the tools to provide visibility and transparency into how products move throughout the day.

CEO and Founder Yosh Rozen articulates this point here:

“So the problem we're solving at PartRunner are companies that move 1000s of products every single day, rely on multiple small providers that are either little to no tech, or no specialization in handling big and bulky products.”

By not having specialization in the big and bulky space, they can’t respond to requests beyond small parcels and goods. A provider who can deliver small parcels in the same day or meet temperature requirements, might not be able to satisfy the same with non-standard sized items. This causes the cost of big and bulky deliveries to be three times the cost of small parcels.

Nuanced considerations of big and bulky include size and weight of items, packing, and pick up and drop off specifications. Due to these considerations, specialization is required. PartRunner has designed a way to scale the matching of these requirements with available drivers on an on-demand basis.

PartRunner built a team of experts in digital logistics, traditional logistics and big and bulky logistics. By addressing these inefficiencies with a team of experts, PartRunner has been able to connect companies to a network of hundreds of independent truckers and small fleets. At the core, PartRunner is logistics marketplace with a flexible fleet network of drivers that adapt to the needs of their business customers.

PartRunner has grown significantly over the past few years - with around 3,600 routes per month, over 27,000 stops per month, and about 1,000 active drivers affiliated with our platform across four cities in the US and in six cities in Mexico.

Addressing these issues came with challenges.

The growth in the big and bulky space introduces key problems to OEMs and retailers. Customer expectations for on-demand experiences and a lack of workers to satisfy just in time requirements. Small delivery providers lack the tools toprovide visibility and transparency into how products move throughout the day.

For instance, keeping up with iOS and Android updates alone proved arduous and time consuming enough to impact the team's ability to consistently track workers on assignments within their network. These were recurring challenges that would need to be addressed again after solving them once.

“So the problem we're solving at PartRunner are companies that move 1000s of products every single day, rely on multiple small providers that are either little to no tech, or no specialization in handling big and bulky products.”

The team implemented the following solution from HyperTrack’s suite of SDKs and APIs that help developers build location intelligence into custom business logic and mobile apps.

Once the team identified the core requirements, they decided to leverage the expertise of a third party to bring to bear the experience necessary. In 2022, the team was introduced to HyperTrack and they quickly started working closely to together to improve PartRunner’s solution, with remarkable results.

HyperTrack enables the assignment of work on-demand. Assignment systems use a number of factors to allocate work to a driver. Knowing the live location of available drivers, and ranking them as nearest first from the first point of fulfillment (pickup, visit, delivery, or gig location), becomes a critical input to dispatch systems. For PartRunner the ability to consider a wide variety of factors is particularly useful as big and bulky deliveries often require such specialization.

By having the ability to document travel in real time, operations teams are able to capture the location of drivers and share this with customers. By capturing key information about the location of the driver, operations teams can easily see which deliveries are taking place in real time, increasing visibility for all parties.

Since the operations teams have the location data throughout the fulfillment process, HyperTrack supports streams of this data to be presented on dashboards. By receiving this data through webhook streams, PartRunner is able to embed these real-time views within the operations team’s control tower.

HyperTrack enables the assignment of work on-demand. Assignment systems use a number of factors to allocate work to a driver. Knowing the live location of available drivers, and ranking them as nearest first from the first point of fulfillment (pickup, visit, delivery, or gig location), becomes a critical input to dispatch systems. For PartRunner the ability to consider a wide variety of factors is particularly useful as big and bulky deliveries often require such specialization.

Improving Accuracy of Tracking Driver Location

The ability to track driver location improved substantially. With the HyperTrack SDK in place, the team was able to trust the accuracy of the driver location on a consistent continuous basis. This confidence in the drivers location allowed the team to build dashboards, notifications and processes that improve the customer experience and how operations teams assign orders and make other decisions based on real-time data in the field.

Finding Nearby Drivers with HyperTrack APIs

Prior to HyperTrack, PartRunner’s platform estimated driver location based on pickup locations, requiring continuous calculation of distances. This required significant API costs without always presenting accurate real-time data. Now, by using HyperTrack’s APIs catered to their use cases, PartRunner can build features to standardize response times and reduce per order costs.

As CTO Tarun Aleti explains:

“Now we are able to ping our nearby drivers about a potential trip. And because we know the distance, because we know the location, we know that distance, and we have an ETA for everyone and our even the pay and everything can get more customized to driver locations.”

HyperTrack allowed the team to answer questions like: How do you track even when someone is not using the phone? Previously,PartRunner could not find a single solution or third party service to solve these nuanced challenges that are prevalent in the on-demand delivery space.

Gig Worker Routes and Enhancing Customer Visibility

With HyperTrack SDKs and APIs, PartRunner can continue to build location intelligence into all aspects of their platform. In particular, the rich data – both real time and historical, gives PartRunner the ability to create improved routes, optimized for stops and pick ups, and the potential to insert on-demand orders into scheduled routes.

By building on this functionality, the team also intends to extend visibility throughout the entire fulfillment process to customers. PartRunner sees the potential in HyperTrack integrations to improve trust in the services they provide. By closing gaps between operations teams and drivers in the field, PartRunner improves transparency which decreases customer inquiries, streamlines processes and helps control support costs on a per order basis.

HyperTrack provides the building blocks to automate on-demand jobs and workforce. Our APIs and SDKs for planning, assigning, tracking, and verification learn from ground truth data to improve operational KPIs including job completion rate, workforce reliability, productivity, and on-time delivery.

HyperTrack provides workforce automation and proof-of-work solutions that are trusted by over 300 companies worldwide across various industries, from technology, light industrial, security, retail, hospitality, and healthcare to energy and transportation. Start building with the free trial at https://hypertrack.com/