Dver Corp. drives change within the South Korean logistics industry by upending traditional processes
Back in 2018, Jang Seung-Rae was a senior developer at one of the largest South Korean telecommunications companies LG Uplus. As a developer with a proven track record, Jang had also helmed a content agency a decade ago. The entrepreneurial bug never left him, so he started exploring another business with five co-workers (Team Dver), after successfully winning seed round funding with their long-term employer for in-house start-ups. Motivated by growing local e-commerce and food delivery platforms such as premium grocery retailer MarketKurly, and NYSE (New York Stock Exchange)-listed Coupang, Jang and his partners identified a niche in the fulfilment ecosystem of delivery partners. The team dove head-first into the delivery market and soon identified three problems rampant within the traditional logistics industry: First, low wages among delivery professionals due to a standard 25% commission taken by logistics companies, second, outdated delivery and logistics management with a heavy reliance on hand-written delivery records, and third, disjointed partnerships among logistics, couriers and staffing companies. Reflecting on improvements that could be made to the service, the team launched mobile app Dver, where anyone with a driver's licence could register themselves as delivery partners. Just a year later, Jang found himself the CEO of a SaaS (Software-As-A-Service) start-up specialising in heightened delivery experiences, Dver Corp. in December 2019.
Driving product excellence with lean IT resources and lower maintenance costs
Within a year of its inception, the start-up successfully paved a way to create the Dver ecosystem -- gaining more than 20,000 nationwide delivery partners, inking business partnerships with multiple big and small-to-medium sized businesses, and winning pre-A fundings from its former parent company LG Uplus, local start-up accelerator D.Camp, and leading venture capital Capstone Partners Co.
While Dver has seen a healthy growth trajectory, COVID 19-led digital transformation meant Dver found it necessary to systematically manage in-house teams’ access to internal systems.
"Along with Dver's rapid growth, we have been facing the need to categorise our employees by more than just department. We wanted to categorise them into specific job functions and projects for clarity on who is responsible for what. To securely automate login and employee segmentations by team and projects, we decided to implement Okta SSO (Single Sign On), which includes their MFA products such as Email verification, security questions and OTP," says Researcher Hong Jong-Geun, IT Management Team at Dver.
To ensure proper end-to-end implementation, Dver enlisted the help of Seoul-based Okta solution vendor Elcid Corp., as this was not the first time Dver used a cloud-based SSO product.
"Previously, (Team) Dver had been temporarily using Microsoft ADFS SSO to sign in to internal apps like G-Suite and Atlassian JIRA for a year, " shares Shin Doo-hwan, Technical Director of Elcid Corp. "Microsoft ADFS SSO is a free offering, so it may be an attractive solution for start-ups to kickstart quickly. But it becomes challenging when the business starts to grow because it eventually leads to extra IT resources and maintenance costs. Dver's engineers needed larger integration coverage with publicly open product 101 documents, to save time and reduce maintenance costs. Okta’s SSO proved very flexible and allowed Dver’s team to focus more on business-centric developments, with backend tech support provided by Okta's in-house engineers and local technical partners."
Researcher Hong agrees that Dver's IT management team immediately found it beneficial to migrate its company resources from Microsoft ADFS to Okta’s interface. "We have been using AWS SSO for development purposes, network security solutions and several in-house backend applications aligned with our SmartMail centre, DPOST and fulfilment centres. Okta solutions enabled our developers to focus exclusively on improving Dver app’s frontend for customers and delivery partners, along with backend apps that support the operation staff at DPOSTs and fulfilment centres, rather than wasting time on old-fashioned tech support roles."
"Thanks to Okta, it only takes one hour to integrate an application to Dver’s in-house built interface, versus one month. This allows us to focus on our product development while saving on maintenance costs and additional tech support resources," Hong adds.
Dver’s IT Management team plans to integrate Okta's LCM (Lifecycle Management) by the beginning of 2022 into their workflow. "Along with Dver's future people planning and department segmentations, Okta’s LCM would make it easier for the IT Management team to seamlessly provision and deprovision applications to categorised user groups, especially with new hires and temporary teams working on upcoming projects," says Shin.
Seamless data management for client retention and loyalty within the Dver ecosystem
On the business side, Dver management executives have entered business partnerships with more than 2,000 local enterprises from diverse industries encompassing telecommunications, media, retail, finance, real estate management and more. Dver’s ultimate business goal is to create a nationwide Dver ecosystem where enterprises enjoy a seamless end-to-end delivery experience from making orders on Dver’s app, to pick-ups at DPOSTs installed at the clients' office buildings. As these SmartMail centres are linked to an analytics dashboard where Dver consultants and developers can monitor delivery details along with client satisfaction, the company aims to keep raising the bar on delivery experiences and drive customer loyalty. To achieve this, the company’s priority is to manage delivery partners with low credentials.
"Dver is happy to offer work to anyone who can drive, as a delivery partner. At the same time, we need to ensure that delivery partners with the best credentials and quality customer service, are assigned to as many delivery opportunities as possible to meet our clients’ needs," says Hong.
About Dver Corp
Dver Corp. is a digital logistics platform founded in November 2019. Dver offers local businesses a smart and safe delivery service through an app, where customers are connected to the nearest partner to schedule deliveries in under a minute. Dver also provides DPOST, a smart mail centre installed at B2B clients’ workplaces to enable bulk purchase delivery, and over 20,000 registered delivery partners.
