Urbantz live tracking transforms last-mile delivery

From the outset, realtime was at the heart of Urbantz’ client proposition, powering a dashboard for office-based delivery managers to monitor the entire delivery fleet and adapt delivery or pick-up schedules on the fly. 

To decide efficiently, delivery managers need granular, live fleet visibility and parcel status information, potentially across hundreds of delivery vehicles. Confidence in the data – and therefore realtime performance - is vital.  

Urbantz knew that engineering its own, basic realtime infrastructure – with no guarantees around mission critical issues like data integrity, reliability and availability - could take six specialist developers at least three months, cost more than $100,000 and add a layer of complexity that would throttle its commitment to ongoing innovation. It set out to find a reliable realtime provider instead.

Urbantz chose Ably to provide the realtime communication infrastructure that would power its client dashboards – making driver app data like location, delivery updates and photos immediately available to delivery managers.  

A number of factors drove Urbantz to choose Ably – from ease of integration thanks to the Ably API library and free technical onboarding support, through to the data integrity and availability guarantees that are crucial to a slick customer experience for delivery managers. 

What’s more, Ably would essentially be invisible to Urbantz developers working to innovate and improve the core platform. As Justin Bériot, CTO at Urbantz explained: “No-one needs to know we use Ably. Our developers just call a function and its works. It’s like magic.”

The decision to use Ably for realtime infrastructure proved a wise one – reducing time to market by up to six months and eliminating the need to spend $100,000 or more on specialist developer skills. 

Ably delivers on performance too. Urbantz can rely on predictable, consistent global latencies and bandwidth, and a fault-tolerant realtime platform designed to maintain end-to-end message integrity – including 100% guaranteed message delivery and message ordering.  

As a result, realtime has played a key role in helping to drive growth, by elevating Urbantz’ value proposition for last mile delivery providers. Feedback from customers like Steven De Bruyn, CEP at VPD, makes it clear: “Recently we closed a deal with a customer, who wanted to see the realtime journey of the order and proof of delivery. In this case, we were able to present Urbantz’ functionality as a convincing argument.”

Ably technical support has played an important role in maintaining service standards too, by proactively notifying Urbantz when unpredictable loads or spiking connections suggest an issue with its own platform.  

Bériot said about Ably: “It takes care of all our realtime communication needs and gives our customers the immediacy and user experience they demand, but is practically invisible – it just works in the background. It’s reliable and the technical support is amazing.”

Urbantz has been an Ably customer for over a decade, and still re-evaluates every vendor they use, every year. Marijn Vandevoorde, VP of Engineering at Urbantz, recently reached out to say:

"In ten years of reviewing every vendor we use, Ably is one of the very few we have never moved off. The pricing scales with our usage, the platform does not fail us, and when we ask the support team a hard question we get an answer we can act on."