Smart postal box simplifies
parcel delivery and return.

Author

Hans van Nikkelen Kuijper

CEO of Sesam Solutions

Utrecht, The Netherlands

"We needed to find technical partners able to translate a concept into a tangible solution, make use of the newest technology available and get the product to market fast. This was the main criteria we used to decide on the right partners for our business. We chose BusyMachines because they were capable of handling this new technology and already had the skills and competence we were looking for. BusyMachines skill set and work process matched our needs and requirements in terms of software and platform-development."

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  • Client: Parcer
  • Time to market: 6 months
  • Industry: Internet of Things & Logistics
  • Product

    Easy delivery & return of packages with an internet-connected smart postal box.

    See Product Gallery
  • Value proposition

    Affordable smart postal box. Seamless customer experience when sending and receiving parcels.

  • Our delivery team — 3.5 FTE

    2.0Backend

    1.0Web

    0.25PM

    0.25Techops

Delivery timeline

  • MVPDuration: 6 months

    Service: Dedicated Software Teams

    BusyMachines designed & implemented the cloud platform and the web app. We worked together with the firmware and hardware team to integrate the platform with the postal box via a M2M communication protocol. Dozens of fully working postal boxes were delivered to early adopters during the first month after launch.

  • Post MVPDuration: 9 months

    Service: Dedicated Software Teams

    BusyMachines provided continuous software development with a dedicated agile team. The main objective was to integrate the box solution with popular eCommerce platforms & sites. We worked in short development cycles and released every two weeks.

  • Maintenance

    Service: BusyCare

    When no development is needed, the client just pays maintenance costs and we keep everything available and fully functional.

The vision of Parcer

Parcer believes in a future where sending & receiving parcels is as convenient as today’s online shopping. The company's ambition was to build a smart postal box & a SaaS platform around it. The platform integrates with a wide ecosystem of eCommerce and delivery companies.

The end customers can control their own postal box directly from the web. This makes it easy to share access to the postal box for delivery & returns.

The work of BusyMachines

The technical challenge consisted in building a communication platform for locking and unlocking a remote ultra low energy postal box. Our answer was a software solution that communicates via a low power IOT infrastructure (ie. SigFox) & minimises data transfers using time-based smart access codes.

  • BusyMachines was responsible for the technical architecture of Parcer and the implementation of the complete software solution. To facilitate the end user integration, the team developed a Chrome browser plugin that provided seamless integration with the checkout process of several eCommerce sites (ie. Bol, Amazon etc.).

  • We also designed and automated the entire cloud production infrastructure.

  • Technology stack

    BackendScala, Akka, ElasticSearch, Akka HTTP

    WebJS, AngularJS, HTML5, CSS3, Chrome Plugin

    PMScrum / Agile

    TechopsDocker, AWS

  • Deliverables

    Cloud platform

    Web portal (B2B & B2C): My Parcer

    Chrome browser extension

    Firmware/Hardware integration

    AWS deployment

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