This Mobile App Tracks Deliveries in Real Time for All to See When it comes to tracking your food from the restaurant to your door, Bringg delivers.
By Matt Villano
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's Friday night, and your pizza is MIA. When will the delivery guy show up? Meanwhile, back at the pizza joint, the owner is wondering when the driver will return. Thanks to Israel-based Bringg, now everyone can find out what they need to know.
Bringg offers a cloud-based service platform for businesses that enables customers to track an order from the moment they enter it to the moment the delivery person rings the doorbell.
"The delivery world is changing because customers are becoming more sophisticated and expecting more," says co-founder and CEO Raanan Cohen. "Our tool helps businesses keep up."
Bringg works by syncing a web-based management dashboard integrated into a point-of-sale system with a smartphone app that delivery people use from the field. When a new order comes in, it can be sent automatically to the delivery driver nearest the customer. The system then texts or emails the customer with information on who the driver is, where he or she is located and the expected arrival time.
An embedded link opens a map so the customer can track the delivery in real time (helpful for receiving deliveries in a building lobby or at the front gate). Once the delivery arrives, Bringg sends the customer a "virtual doorbell" alert.
The delivery person can use a mobile device to take pictures of the product, receive a customer signature and collect feedback. Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, the manager keeps track of each step of every delivery in real time through Bringg's web-based dashboard.
Pricing starts at $10 per driver per month; an alternate option charges companies per order—usually between 5 cents and 25 cents, depending on volume.
Zuppler, a restaurant delivery service based in Conshohocken, Pa., saw immediate results with Bringg's system. For years, Zuppler's operations managers communicated with drivers via text message—a strategy that was not scalable. The company switched to Bringg at the end of 2014, and within weeks saw volume more than double. "It's so automated at this point that we can grow into a new territory at any time and manage it remotely," says Zuppler founder and CEO Shiva Srinivasan.
Cohen (who cashed in on the 2007 IPO of his last company, the communications tool MobileMax) and Bringg co-founder Lior Sion (formerly of GetTaxi, the Israeli competitor to Uber), raised $2.5 million in seed money in 2013 from Ituran, an Israel-based fleet-management company.
Armed with this cash, Bringg is out to help small independent businesses take on the Domino's of the world. But Cohen sees package delivery as his company's next logical market.
"Really," he says, "any business that makes deliveries or service calls can work better with Bringg."
