Industrial Business, Warehousing

New Zapala Go warehousing management platform

Zapala founder and CEO Carlos Ferri and some of his staff.

Zapala Go, a cloud-based platform for end-to-end management of warehousing, removal, relocation and storage businesses, has been launched by Sydney-based logistics company Zapala.

The company says  Zapala Go “allows business operators to track and trace storage boxes or containers from overseas agents, interstate or local, through acceptance into warehouses, into storage, and then back out to customer premises, with full control of jobs, electronic inventories, goods with history, photos and specific locations”.

And, in what Zapala says is a first for the industry, clients can follow each job in real-time from the beginning through to delivery.

“The inspiration for the product came from my own frustration with the outdated and unreliable technology my industry uses to manage the tracking of items — where they have come from, what they are stored in, where they need to go to, and who they belong to,” Zapala founder and CEO Carlos Ferri says.

“It doesn’t seem much to ask to be able to reliably track the passage of goods from one party to another and yet the solutions that were available to us were unreliable, inflexible, paper based and outdated,” he says.

“I decided the best way to get exactly what Zapala needed was to begin working on a tech startup to develop and sell a new kind of software to the industry.”

That software, he says, can help clients to reduce labour and error costs by 35 percent a year by shifting them away from conventional paper-based documentation and enabling open access to job information from any device.

Ferri arrived in Australia from Brazil in 2010 with a couple of suitcases and with only a few words of English. He says he started working in removals, worked hard until he could buy his first truck and now, six years later, heads warehousing and removals management company Zapala, employing 50 staff and managing more than 20,000 square metres of warehouse space.

Zapala Go is backed by startup accelerator BlueChilli, Blacksheep Capital and a small group of private investors.

“BlueChilli CEO Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin and I spent some time together in Antarctica last year and very soon we had a clear idea of what the product needed to do and what kind of business we needed to create in order to develop, market and sell our own solution as Zapala Go,” Ferri says.

Eckersley-Maslin says his venture tech company is used to working with intelligent, dynamic entrepreneurs, “but even against that high bar, Carlos distinguishes himself as a guy who really gets things done”.

“To go from nothing to build one of Australia’s most successful warehousing management businesses in only six years (and along the way learn to speak great English) is a big achievement, and I don’t see Carlos slowing down anytime soon!” he says.

 

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