Osman Akdemir, Founder and CEO of Simply Deliver, wants to make the life of people easier. Since graduation he has dedicated his career to continuous improvement and efficiency within transport & logistics. He believes that “the only constant is change” and therefore software developments should be incremental and ongoing. Logistics calls for an agile working methodology in which small projects are validated and scaled upon results.

Osman, please tell us more about this agile approach

From the beginning I sensed that logistic companies are more and more fed up with big and expensive software projects. They need more flexible, smaller and less risky project implementations. In other words, they need agile implementations. This is more efficient and enables you to set things up quickly, get results and move on to the next project. At the heart of this model lies efficiency at a competitive price. Simply Deliver offers an ecosystem with end-to-end solutions for the logistics market b a step-by-step approach where customers can only pay what they use!

With this approach, we have implemented our solutions for more than 30 customers. They mostly start with the easiest, most effective and fastest implementable solution, see the benefits of usage, success rate by users and then scale up for the next efficiency or supply chain service improvements. A great advantage of our Software as a Service is the scalability and the bi-weekly automatic updates. The number of users, supply chain partner-users, transactions or computations is unlimited.

If you could describe your solutions in one word …

I know it’s 2 words, but it’s the reality of what we’re offering to the market. All our modules increase the efficiency of your organization and facilitate visibility, control and the digital interaction with clients and supply chain partners in the fastest, easiest and cheapest way. For instance, our Automated File Converter can receive & process any type of file (PDF, Excel & Word) and convert the order data into a booking in your system in seconds. This removes human mistakes and unburdens the organization from much administrative work. Imagine, what your colleagues can do if they no longer need to copy and paste information manually. And the implementation of this module can be done in 2/3 weeks!

Any new developments you would like to share?

Recently, we launched Simply Commercial, a unique proposition in the logistics market that makes sales smarter and boosts sales efficiency. Logistics is getting more complex with many different supply chain parties. Calculating different routes can be a daunting and time-consuming task. On top of that we see that more and more buyers do not want long term contracts, but spot-based pricing. This has an enormous effect on the number of quotes an organization has to send out. Automatic checks of complex intermodal network plannings and extended SLA’s with minimal efforts becomes reality.

This CRM & Offer Management module is the Salesforce / Hubspot for the logistics market and brings speed to your quotation process while helping you to keep all CRM processes & information centralized. This module provides lots of data analytics during the offering process, such as success rate of quotes per customer, pricing analysis from the past offers & contracts. You automatically get routing options for transport requests, have a pro-active automated follow-up and get a 100% clear overview of all your sales activities. And not to forgot, our forthcoming release of our Intermodal TMS, which is real-time connected with all sub contractors and terminals.

What do you envision for the coming 5 years?

Personally, I think that every logistics company and shipper should work with an ecosystem or has to become an ecosystem itself. All parties need to work seamlessly together, and it is not unthinkable that a selected group of platforms will handle the order management in the future while others will remain suppliers. Whether you are a trucking company, a warehouse, an operator, or a carrier, your capacity has to be available online to maximize utilization, reduce CO2, be reliable and agile. It is all about flexibility and transparency.

Companies want to compare pricing, service quality and keep challenging the logistics service providers with real-time track & trace information as out-of-the-box features. Therefore, in 5 years, any logistics company who is not yet part of an ecosystem or an ecosystem-itself will absolutely be obsolete!

How does Simply Deliver fit in this picture?

We have developed a white label ecosystem with a variety of plug & play modules in which logistics companies can digitalize & automate their processes, extend their services, quality, network fast all at a competitive price. It is the connectivity, delivery speed, scalability and pay-per-user model that makes our modules so successful at a competitive price. Customers including Van den Bosch & Van der Vlist do not want to integrate with all platforms themselves; instead, they use our platform that already offers all these integrations & connections Out-of-the-Box. That is cost efficient and fast. Using our systems frees up time to come up with creative solutions for customers and ultimately work on your competitive advantage.