Romanian courier company implements Azure to offer efficient and reliable delivery services

Sameday is the fastest growing Romanian courier company, using technology to create delivery solutions that drive growth for its customers and partners. The Romanian company offers an extensive range of services: home delivery, the same day delivery and delivery to over 3,200 easybox lockers nationwide. To provide its services effectively, Sameday relies on technology and digitization, and Microsoft Azure is the chosen solution for managing its logistics infrastructure and for managing the locker network and reporting. As a result, the company has seen an increase in its on-time delivery rate and revenue.

Romanian company Sameday is revolutionizing the courier market by using technology to create delivery solutions that stimulate the development of its customers and partners, offering them an extensive range of services: home delivery, same day delivery and delivery to over 3200 easybox lockers at national level “Our vision is to become the largest and the most innovative courier company in South-Eastern Europe, and this can only be possible through technology,” says Dragos Barbulescu, CTO at Sameday.

Four years ago, Sameday was looking to scale up its business with the cloud. “Given the pace of our expansion and the rising complexity of our systems, we wouldn’t have streamlined our operations without a reliable, secure, and stable cloud solution,” says Barbulescu. The company opted for Azure due to Microsoft’s strong presence in Romania and Sameday’s pre-existing reliance on compatible languages and Microsoft tools. Partnering with Sameday was Zitec, a major Microsoft partner in Romania as well as a Naspers company. Zitec helped Sameday manage the new infrastructure to implement Azure in essential services.

Reaching further with Azure

“The network of lockers is a big market differentiator that drives growth,” explains Cristian Pena, Chief Systems Analyst & Partner at Zitec. “That’s why Sameday wanted to upgrade, monitor, and secure its lockers in real time. We had to build a platform from scratch and rely on Azure to manage everything.”

Using a simple integration with IoT Hub and Kubernetes, Zitec was able to construct a way to manage Sameday’s fleet of lockers. This makes it easy to scale up—for example, adding another 1,000 lockers the next day or dealing with a huge influx of parcels during the holiday season. Barbulescu adds, “We can also now do mass updates or control individual lockers in real time via the cloud, enabling us to even consolidate parcels from different orders into one locker. It’s made things more effective.”

Sameday also uses Azure for reporting in order to monitor every parcel individual easybox lockers. “We gather all the necessary data from more than 20 applications, extract meaningful information, then report and steer decisions,” says Barbulescu.

Better service, happier customers

Having optimized its operations with the cloud, Sameday now runs more effective services. “We are now the most digitized courier company in Romania, with a 99 percent uptime of our services,” says Barbulescu. “We have increased our speed, precision, and predictability, and managed to grow our on-time delivery rate from 85 to 95 percent since 2018.

In 2021, Sameday executed more than 400,000 deliveries a day, a big rise from about 250,000 in 2019. As a result, the company has also seen an increased income from US$33 million in 2019 to US$120 million in 2021. Barbulescu says, “Azure gave us the siloed, dedicated infrastructure we needed to grow our business. None of this would have been possible without its uptime and security.”

"We are now the most digitized courier company in Romania. We have increased our speed, precision, and predictability, and managed to grow our on-time delivery rate from 85 to 95 percent since 2018."

Dragos Barbulescu: CTO, Sameday

Moving forward, Sameday plans to move more of its infrastructure and applications to Azure with the help of its partner Zitec. “We want to use Azure Event Hubs for our notification applications and Azure Sentinel WF and DDoS protection for better security,” says Barbulescu. Sameday also plans to launch customer-to-customer services and offer an Uber-like experience for the courier industry.

“Innovation is always a bet. Yet, we’ve proven that you need to innovate to keep up with a constantly evolving market. The great thing is that we feel that we’ve already gained a head start,” concludes Barbulescu.