Exasperated courier users, fed up with hearing excuses about why their parcel has been delayed, will be relieved to hear of the launch of eCourier, a new courier company that promises to overhaul the industry. With an advanced computing system at the heart of its operation, eCourier aims to deliver a service to clients which is fast, professional, reliable and above all transparent. With eCourier clients are in control as they can track their packages in real time on map. The system, developed in conjunction with researchers at UNICAL & UNILE in Italy and MIT in USA as well as developers across Europe, not only takes account of obvious factors, such as whether a nearby courier is available to pick up and whether his vehicle type matches the customer's requirement, but also taps into live traffic and weather data, each courier's past performance on similar journeys and even customer demand patterns to ensure optimal delivery times in all conditions.

eCourier's service will connect clients and couriers directly. For the first time ever, clients will be able to watch their deliveries in real-time as they travel across the streets of the UK via www.ecourier.co.uk. A smart combination of Internet, satellite and mobile technology provide real-time, web-based, second-by-second tracking, and real-time proof of delivery with signature and location stamp the second eCourier delivers. When a client books an eCourier, the company's patented algorithms will instantly dispatch the delivery to the most appropriate courier based on dozens of variables, including time to pick up, vehicle type, as well as current temporal, weather, traffic and demand conditions. The sophisticated system will allows eCourier to keep more couriers on the street doing more jobs, ensuring they are always just minutes away from collection.

The company has been co-founded by Tom Allason (CEO) and Jay Bregman (CTO). Allason's inspiration for setting up eCourier was born out of the frustration of dealing with unreliable courier companies himself. Whilst working at a start-up shipping firm, courier-related stress routinely surpassed that of managing trading vessels and new-building projects. Inspired by the lack of innovation within conventional courier operations, Tom believed that combining cutting-edge technology with a customer-oriented business philosophy would revolutionise the courier industry.

"I was pulling my hair out and it seemed like there was a real gap in the market for a company that could really deliver. The key was objectivity and not being afraid to re-think the business model," said Allason. "No courier company stood out from the crowd because they all operated with the exact same operational model and the resulting service was generally mediocre or poor. It seemed to me that no-one had really considered introducing better technology to bring scale efficiencies and improve the customer's experience, so together with Jay we set about looking at a viable alternative."

Bregman added: "The major limitation hindering conventional courier firms is the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of the human supply-chain. Bookings are taken by a telephonist, passed to a coordinator and then onto a controller. The controller does not have access to much, if any, real-time information and is not always in a good position to know which courier is the best choice for a delivery. The result is not only a poor service experienced by the client but a diminished return for the provider resulting in a classic diseconomy of scale.

At eCourier, Our Advanced Information Based Allocation system overcomes this limitation by passing bookings to the most appropriate courier across the company's entire fleet network. This will enable us to benefit from a real network effect and provide customers with faster collections and deliveries. Unlike a human controller, AIBA makes the decision with access to a wealth of real-time information. This ensures that our customers will receive the very best placed courier for every delivery.

The Company aims to consolidate the UK express delivery market within the next five years and in doing so bring significant scale and service benefits to its clients. "This is a market like any other with the couriers at one side and the customer at the other. eCourier's aim is to minimize intermediation between these two parties and become a transaction facilitator rather than impeder as is currently the case. By reducing transaction costs we are able to maximize the earnings potential of our couriers whilst at the same time minimising the cost to the client. This is a £1Bn market in which the largest player has under 5% marketshare, eCourier's potential is enormous.

The company will begin with a fleet of 9 couriers and seven staff however expects to grow the fleet to around 100 couriers by the end of 2005, and to 10,000 by 2010.

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