Tag: Europe

Up until a few years ago, university friends Tom Allason and Jay Bregman knew little about the courier business except that they could probably do a better job.

Mr Allason decided to act when, stuck in meetings at work, he arranged to have some tickets for that day’s play at Queens Tennis Club biked over to some friends.

The courier not only arrived late and delivered the tickets to the wrong person, but Mr Allason found the person arranging the booking had little clue about where his precious cargo was until it was too late.

“It wasn’t so much that I didn’t know what was going on, but that they didn’t either,” Mr Allason recalls. “I decided enough was enough and set about trying to provide a better solution by myself.”

The answer he and Mr Bregman hit upon was to create the world’s first online same-day delivery business, called eCourier.

Each of eCourier’s van drivers and bike riders log in for work on handheld computers, equipped with a global positioning system so they can be tracked throughout their shift.

At the heart of the business, however, is a software system that can do the work of an army of regular courier administration staff, accepting bookings and allocating jobs to available drivers according to their GPSlocation.

The data the system gathers can be used to compute who is the best rider for a job, their estimated time of delivery and their exact progress on a map.

This information is then shared with customers, who can see the exact position of each of their jobs by logging on to eCourier’s website.

After just 19 months of operations, eCourier is handling 15,000 deliveries a month for some of London’s largest investment banks, law firms and retailers.