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Paccurate reduces shipping costs and minimizes carbon emissions with the help of Google Cloud

September 16, 2022
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James Malley

Founder and CEO, Paccurate

Rising shipping costs are preventing retailers from delivering basic items people need at an affordable price. Although the retail industry has spent decades trying to bring new efficiencies to shipping, higher fuel costs and supply chain disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic are worsening the challenge.  

At Paccurate, we believe smarter packing is key to creating a more efficient, sustainable, and greener supply chain. That’s why we built a comprehensive shipping and fulfillment optimization platform. With Paccurate, retailers analyze their shipping history to find ideal box sizes, control how they're packed so they can minimize costs and SCOPE-3 emissions. Retailers also leverage Paccurate to avoid costly supply chain issues by anticipating how many of each carton they will need in the future.

Our customers are seeing impressive results as they cut air in shipments by 22%, lower shipping costs 16%, and decrease the use of packaging materials by over 13%. As Paccurate continues to grow, we’ll introduce new solutions and services to further optimize the packing process, lower distribution center operating costs, and minimize SCOPE-3 shipping emissions well beyond our current track record of 14%.
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Analyzing and optimizing packing instructions in less than two milliseconds

Although Paccurate was initially built on a legacy technology stack, we quickly realized we needed a scalable cloud-based solution to reliably support tens of millions of high-speed, low latency queries. We also knew it would be difficult for our small team to develop new capabilities and features without reducing IT costs and shifting more resources to R&D.

We looked at the options and identified Google Cloud, including the Google for Startups Cloud Program, as the best choice to help us cost-effectively scale Paccurate to meet increased customer demand. The secure-by-design infrastructure of Google Cloud now enables retailers to efficiently pack and deliver the items people need at more affordable prices.

Specifically, we rely on Cloud Run to rapidly analyze shipments and return optimized packing instructions in less than two milliseconds. We also leverage Cloud DNS for end-to-end domain management, App Engine to develop and host web applications, Cloud Functions to run code across multiple environments, and Cloud SQL to automate database provisioning.

With the help of Paccurate and Google Cloud solutions, our customers save an average of one square foot of cardboard per carton while lowering overall fulfillment costs by over 20%.

Building a comprehensive shipping and fulfillment optimization platform on Google Cloud

The Google for Startups Cloud Program has been instrumental in helping us expand and scale our shipping and fulfillment optimization platform. We especially want to highlight the Google Cloud credits we relied on to cost-effectively trial and deploy the solutions Paccurate now uses to analyze and optimize millions of shipments every month.  

In the future, we plan on leveraging Google Cloud AI and machine learning products to further refine on-demand analyses that simulate how variables such as SKU dimensions, warehouse location, and packing material vendors affect packing and shipping costs. We also want to help retailers program smarter warehouse robots and machines to more efficiently create the right boxes based on carrier, zone, and service type. 

We can’t wait to see what we accomplish next as we grow our team and introduce new smart packing services and solutions that reduce cubic volume, wasted material, and shipping costs to benefit retailers and customers alike. 


If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.
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