From an office at the top of Regent Street overlooking Wollongong a small team of 20 run the software that handles 60 per cent of all containers that arrive in New Zealand, and it all started at a yard in Unanderra.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Now the company is targeting getting its home-grown software in heavy vehicles around the globe.
Allotrac, founded by Joel Kotamanidis and David Rowles, began with Mr Rowles's business, Rowles Site Solutions (RSS), as the initial - and ongoing - guinea pig for the development of the software.
"In the first 12 months, Joel and I were in a demountable office, getting everything out of my head," Mr Rowles said.
With 40 years of experience in the transport industry, Mr Rowles knows the ins and outs of the industry, but getting that knowledge into a 21st century format was the challenge.
"It's an archaic environment," Mr Kotamanidis said. "Very, very heavily paper based. It's still very old school."
Going through these processes step by step revealed double-handling, inefficiencies and room for error.
"We originally came out to remove paper, streamline operations, from sale through to yard operations, through to delivery," Mr Kotamanidis said.
"We originally tried to fix a problem in [Mr Rowles'] business, and soon found out there's a much, much wider problem across every vertical of heavy vehicle transport."
Starting out in 2012, by 2014, the company had a product ready for market developed while based out of iAccelerate. As the company grew, it drew upon other IT start-ups in Wollongong.
"There's always someone that was going through or went through the same thing, having that network is an amazing thing now," Mr Kotamanidis said.
The company now employs 20 sales and technical staff in Wollongong as well as 50 developers in Pakistan.
Along the way, businesses like Mr Rowles have seen a step change in growth, while retaining their existing headcount and bringing tech-averse drivers and staff along with them.
"There's usually a bit of kickback in the early days, but once they work out how easy it is, nice big buttons and a simple process, it saves them so much time."
With a footprint stretching from Batemans Bay, to Canberra and Newcastle, RSS handles hundreds of deliveries every day, all of which are allocated, tracked, recorded and invoiced digitally through the Allotrac platform.
"I would hate to think how we would deal with that without our technology," Mr Rowles said.
Today, while the company has a solid customer base in the Illawarra, including BlueScope, it has customers around Australia and internationally, including a large presence in New Zealand.
"Sixty per cent of the containers that go into New Zealand come through our platform," Mr Kotamanidis said.
But what keeps the business in the Illawarra is the talent and lifestyle.
"We have a very good network and some large software companies here in Wollongong," Mr Karamanidis said. "The talent in Wollongong is amazing, the remote working environment is also, we don't need to travel to Sydney."
Sign up to receive The Business Briefing in your inbox each Thursday at 6am by selecting Business below:
