Goody has been a customer for just over a year. They’ve been using our location SDK to power their delivery, transportation and logistics service.
As a delivery, transportation and logistics service, location plays an important role in helping Goody provide a fast and efficient delivery system with reliable logistics support and an efficient tracking system.
We sat down with Shivraj Gaurav, Co Founder & Director of Goody, to hear about their story and experience using Roam’s SDK and APIs.
Who is Goody and what do they do?
Goody is an on-demand platform, our mission is to deliver anything, anywhere. This ranges from small item deliveries to large truck deliveries. Their product range offering for delivery starts at light two wheeler vehicles, three wheelers, [Tata] 407’s, Eichers, and up to 26ft trucks.
Their service is divided into three parts, which is on-demand, enterprise and intercity business in India. They deliver any item on-demand, as well as scheduled, for intercity and enterprise customers. Currently they are serving in five cities in India: Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.
The rest of this article reads from the words and perspectives of Shivraj himself. He told us about the challenges he faced with location, how Roam helped, and a road map for Goody’s future.
Overcoming location challenges
Since we are an on-demand company, our main challenge was location tracking of the driver on a 24/7 basis. For any on-demand delivery company, driver location for allocating the orders is the most crucial thing. It’s a fundamental first step in your business since you will need to track their location accordingly for your allocation module to work. Knowing the precise location of the driver no matter when lets you allocate your orders efficiently to the set of drivers and the set of orders you have.
If you want to allocate an order in such a way that it decreases the delivery time and makes your platform overall more efficient you’ll need location tracking. So Roam’s location SDK absolutely helped us in fetching the driver’s location 24/7 no matter the circumstances.
How Roam helped
For what we wanted to achieve with our platform it’s pretty complicated because there’s specific challenges we had to figure out. Basically, we came across a few technical glitches that made tracking difficult.
You have to accommodate for different devices, device permissions, and user permissions. You also have to distinguish between whether the device is on-duty or off-duty, if it’s in the network or not. These are things that we encountered and needed to solve.
I think after one month post-integration our tracking became a lot smoother. It actually got rid of the headache I was experiencing with the issues we were having with location. Roam is handling that for us, so I’m thankful to you guys on that particular part.
Future Plans
We’ve launched a pilot program which is known as Code Tracking. This program lets our drivers rent out vehicles for a certain period of time without needing to own it. We’d have the different owner’s vehicles listed on our platform to choose from. They’ll be able to do their job whilst renting out a vehicle and then partially pay the cost to the owner. This program is already featured in our drivers app and we’re currently pilot testing it in all our locations.
Location will be important in this case because of security. The driver using the vehicle is not the owner, and so we’ll need to track the location of the vehicle as well as the driver. Currently, the location of a vehicle is dependent on the location of the mobile app and device of the driver. Basically, we’d like to separate the mobile device location tracking and the vehicle for an extra layer of security. Currently, we are exploring options on how to achieve this, for instance through hardware GPS, and we’d like to work with Roam through this process.
We are also looking forward to using Roam’s Pub/Sub model and API’s because we’ve experienced an issue in our current system whenever a driver and device is not connected to the internet we’re struggling with consistent location tracking and data. We know that Roam offers offline tracking, and so we’d like to integrate this eventually into our app.
Final Note
I am happy with the journey we’ve had together so far. The support we get from your tech team has been enormously helpful. Goody works with many third party companies and we consider you tech support to be the best.
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We are thankful for Goody and the great partnership we’ve built with them over this year. We’re excited to see what they do next.