Skip to main content
Hopnet - The Supply Chain Company

Our Approach

Hopnet prices on the outcome an engagement delivers  stockouts prevented, dumps and shorts eliminated, dock time recovered and not on the number of engineers, hours, or licenses involved. We call our engineers "forward-deployed" because they sit inside your operations, not in a ticketing queue billing by the hour. This page explains what that means and why it changes what you should expect to pay for.

forward_deployed_engineer_for_supply_chain

What a Forward-Deployed Model Actually Means

The term "forward-deployed engineer" has become associated with a specific way of building enterprise software: instead of engineers building features in isolation and hoping customers adopt them, engineers embed directly inside the customer's operations  working with real data, real warehouse floors, real delivery runs and only generalize a fix into reusable product once the same problem shows up across multiple engagements.

That's the model Hopnet runs on. Our engineers don't hand you a dashboard and a training deck. They sit with your warehouse, OMS, GPS, and POD data, reconcile what's actually happening on the ground, and build working systems around your real operational mess fragmented ERPs, WhatsApp-coordinated fleets, spreadsheet approvals included.

How This Plays Out Inside Dairy, Frozen Food, and Wholesale Distribution

  • Dairy: an FDE traces overstocking, buffer returns, and drop-point mismatches by connecting OMS, secondary sales, and vehicle movement data the kind of low shelf-life, high-frequency-dispatch problem that a generic inventory dashboard never catches in time.
  • Frozen food: an FDE reconstructs cold-chain visibility across multi-warehouse networks, matching dispatch and arrival timestamps to catch spoilage and drop-point errors before they show up as a month-end write-off.
  • Wholesale distribution: an FDE closes the gap between order management and ground truth matching proof-of-delivery against warehouse stock by type (good, in-transit, damaged, rejected) so that dumps, shorts, and missing stock show up on a graph the same week, not the following quarter.

    • Resource-Based Billing vs. Hopnet's Value-Based Model

      Resource-Based Billing Hopnet's Value-Based Model
     What you pay for Hours, headcount, licenses Outcomes delivered: stockouts avoided, dumps/shorts eliminated, SLA breaches surfaced
     Cost as team scales Rises with every added engineer Stays tied to the problem, not the headcount solving it
     Incentive alignment Vendor is paid more the longer the problem takes Vendor is paid for the problem being solved
     Upfront commitment Large, scoped before your data is understood Free diagnostic first; commercial terms follow
     What improves over time Nothing structural, next project starts from zero The platform, every engagement makes the next one faster
    Connect With Us