Burq bets on the last-mile decision layer as giants retreat

“It still came down to that Uber couldn’t be the single source for everything,” Stein told FreightWaves. “Mostly gig, reasonably shorter distances, some batching but not large scale, no big and bulky. And they can’t be 100% of every possible location.”

The fallback pitch was to add providers, which created a new challenge.

“Our sales pitch sort of sometimes fell on ‘well, you should have more than one provider,’ and then what does that mean?” he said. “How does that get orchestrated? What intelligence is behind making those decisions?”

“There’s been a movement probably over the last at least 10 years now where more and more, especially enterprise-scale companies, are looking at not just one or two or even three national providers,” Stein said. “It’s a whole host of regional providers just for their parcel.”

Layered with 3PL cross-docking and a private fleet, the delivery promise starts to close on Amazon. The management of it does not.

“How do you actually optimize all of that through one source is sort of the ideal flow of what we’re trying to help merchants get to,” Stein said.

Where last-mile orchestration starts: After the OMS hands off

Large retailers already run distributed order management through platforms such as Manhattan or IBM Sterling. Those systems decide where an order ships from based on inventory location, distance, cost and the service levels a retailer wants to promise. They are also expensive.

Companies that run one start a large step ahead, Stein said, “compared to a lot of the mid-market or small companies that can’t afford those enterprise multi-year builds into their systems.”

The gap Burq is targeting opens the moment that decision is executed.

“Once things leave the OMS and they’ve gone out into, let’s say, the parcel carrier or to your own fleet to deliver, even to a third-party gig platform that is like an Uber or a DoorDash,” Stein said, “they don’t know what happens after that. There’s no constant monitoring of what’s going on.”

A package promised in two days that has not been scanned at the pickup point is, in most operations, a customer service call waiting to happen.

“We could say, you know what, we’re going to redispatch or cancel the order with the first courier/carrier and send it to the other carrier who’s a better performance level and we know is more than likely to pick it up,” Stein said.

“There’s really nothing out there that exists that can orchestrate across all of those different nodes and modes and SLAs,” he said. “That’s really the big enterprise solution that we are working to build.”

Real-time orchestration: Nine minutes, then reassign

Stein’s working example runs on a nine-minute threshold.

“We know based on weather, traffic, history of the providers in the area that provider A typically gets there to pick it up within nine minutes, but nine minutes has passed and it hasn’t even been assigned to a driver,” he said. “We just immediately take it and reassign it to the next available courier.”

The replacement courier may cost more. That is a policy question, rather than a technical one, and it can cut against volume commitments already on the books.

“Maybe you’ve had a commitment to a specific carrier. You have to give them a certain number of packages otherwise you get penalties on costs,” Stein said. “So that could all be factored into the decision-making process.”

Adoption runs in stages: background recommendations showing what last month could have saved, then real-time prompts, then full automation “once you become really confident,” Stein said.

Legacy dispatch was built by people, Stein said, and the job outgrew them.

“It’s too complex now,” Stein said. “You need decision-making tools that can go faster.”

Free two-day became the floor

The Amazon effect reset the baseline. That new baseline did not stop at speed. Stein frames the shift as a move toward accuracy.

“I’ll take it for free in two days, but it needs to be here in two days,” he said, describing the current customer posture, “or I’m willing to pay for on-demand and get it within an hour. It better be there within an hour.”

That standard of customer expectation has expanded provider selection into a margin decision at the ZIP code level.

“In this ZIP code, for example, the supply of delivery providers that are out there is really thin, and even though they might be reasonably close to the store, don’t offer same-day delivery to this customer,” Stein said, “because the cost of doing so will either eat into your margin too much or the reliability of that service isn’t going to be strong enough and you’re going to lose that customer permanently.”

That pressure is also reshaping volume. Alternative carriers moved 2.6 billion parcels last year, up 13%, while UPS and USPS volumes each fell 8.3%..

Autonomous delivery is a future timing question

Looking ahead, other modes like drones draw the pilots and the headlines. Stein expects the use cases to stay narrow.

“The use cases, I think, will stay relatively limited just because of weight and complexity and sometimes signatures are required,” he said.

The broader category lands on the same economics that drive orchestration.

“Autonomous in general is absolutely going to be growing, whether it be a drone or autonomous vehicle delivery,” Stein said. “It’s going to have a place because ultimately repeatable deliveries are the ones that you can pull in these types of services and reduce cost and improve speed, and that’s how you compete. So it is inevitable. There’s going to be a lot more testing, but it will actually be happening