Easy Engineering: A brief description of the company and its activities.
POOLYNK: Digitizing the administration of outstanding pallets and containers along the supply chain is the core activity of poolynk and our users come from various industries like food, health care, automotive, construction amongst others as well as classic LSPs. poolynk is a startup, founded in 2016 by former executives who work previously for market leading pool providers (IFCO/CHEP) and software development companies (Initions) almost their entire working life and therefor know load carrier management as well as the logistics industry from many different perspectives.
E.E: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
POOLYNK: Today handing over of reusable packaging along the supply chain is still documented via a paper document – the pallet or exchange note. An ancient process that has never worked do to lost or poor quality paperwork, unsynchronized entries in the affected accounting systems or simple typos. A horrible and expensive manual process. On the other hand we all know the potential blueprint for a fully digital process from the hand over of shipments at the front door at home when the online shopped goods are delivered by the courier. We simply have to confirm the receipt on an electronic hand held. poolynk offers a comparable solution for load device management – a mobile app (iOS and Android) to be used as a digital pallet note feeding a cloud based data base in the back end. All movements and resulting balances of outstanding pallets and containers with your partners can easily accessed on our web portal for administration and reporting as well as transferred to any ERP/WMS/TMS system via our interfaces.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
POOLYNK: We offer our services worldwide. The mobile app can be used in every official language virtually intuitive, whereas the web portal is available in the most important central, southern and eastern European languages. poolynk is designed to work “stand alone” for small or mid sized companies as well as supporting integrated implementations via API interfaces for large applications. In that case it acts as a real time link across organizations & companies and provides the information to connected ERP/TMS/WMS systems.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
POOLYNK: Software as a service “SaaS” is the commercial model with which we operate on the market, that means cost effective, independent – we’re not part of any supply chain – and easy to implement or use, literally plug & play. Where complex implementation projects are necessary with other providers, we only need a few hours to implement and train poolynk with our partner organizations. In addition, we offer consulting and workshops for companies looking for specific know-how to develop and establish efficient loading equipment management processes.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
POOLYNK: A very good question and the answer is not easy. Many companies are still trying to find and, above all, implement digital business processes. Especially when it comes to the cross-company mapping of processes and the associated data exchange, many partners in complex supply chains find it difficult to think in terms of end-to-end solutions. Due to the current situation of the COVID pandemic, we see a certain acceleration of this development, but please consider that many processes in logistics still come from the age of the stagecoach and the pony express.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
POOLYNK: Sustainability and the reduction of the CO2 footprint are also a clear trend in logistics. For many years we have observed strong growth in the area of reusable loading equipment, which is used in open exchange systems or, via pool service providers, in closed systems. What both systems have in common is the need to ideally know in real time where the equipment is currently in order to efficiently control the return logistics and the subsequent next use. As a result, ecological sustainability leads to sustainable economic success. Here poolynk can make a valuable contribution to making the outstanding balances along the supply chain transparent.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
POOLYNK: Our sole mission is the development and operation of the load carrier management platform „poolynk”. We’re constantly improving the usability of the application. Our latest feature is the integration of shipment tracking providing a proof of delivery for the partners.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2022?
POOLYNK: With the further normalization of the economy and the decline in the effects of the COVID pandemic loads, we see an increasing concentration of companies on the digitization of scalable processes, especially at cross-company interfaces within the logistics industry. In particular, the management of containers and pallets along the supply chain is a perfect field for this, as a high profit contribution can be made with relatively little effort when handling reusable load carriers. The savings in the loss of loading equipment and the elimination of paper-based manual processes can save up to 50% of the costs per cycle in loading equipment management.
