It’s not every day you get to watch something you built from scratch take on a life of its own at a much larger scale. On January 21st, Reynolds & Reynolds officially announced Parts Flex Logistics, a logistics tool designed to optimize wholesale parts delivery for automobile dealerships. If that sounds familiar to anyone who’s followed my work, it should. This product has its roots in DDS Track, the delivery management platform I architected, developed, and maintained as a solo consultant for nearly seven years.
Seeing it announced on stage at NADA 2026 is surreal.
The Backstory
For those unfamiliar, DDS Track was a comprehensive shipping and delivery management SaaS platform. I built the entire thing: architecture, full-stack development, UI/UX design, hosting, infrastructure, and ongoing maintenance. The work was deep enough that I was named as an inventor on U.S. Patent 9,286,591 for shipping and delivery management systems.
The platform eventually matured into a relicensable solution and caught the attention of Reynolds & Reynolds, who acquired it. You can read the full story in my DDS Track case study.
What Parts Flex Logistics Looks Like Now
Reynolds has taken the core concepts and built them out into a polished product aimed at their massive dealership network. The announcement highlights capabilities that trace directly back to what we originally built:
- Web-based dispatching for tracking shipments and creating manifests
- Real-time mapping to monitor truck and driver positions
- Route optimization with tracking numbers and barcoded labels
- A mobile driver app for managing tasks, routes, and delivery stops
- Proof of delivery via photos and signatures
As Jason Sideris, VP of Product Planning at Reynolds, put it: “It’s all about knowing where your assets are, and streamlining the routes to reduce delivery times.” That’s exactly the problem we set out to solve years ago when I was sitting down with parts managers learning the ins and outs of their daily operations.
Why This Matters
I’ll be honest: this is one of the proudest moments of my career. Building a product solo, seeing it earn a patent, watching it get acquired, and now seeing it launch as a named product under one of the largest companies in the automotive technology space is the kind of trajectory you hope for but can never guarantee.
It also reinforces something I believe deeply about consulting work. When you invest the time to truly understand a client’s business, not just their technical requirements, you build things that have lasting value. The testimonial from my original client still resonates with me: he said I “took it upon myself to learn the business so that the end-product would be better.” That approach is what made DDS Track more than just a software project.
What I Take From This
Every project I take on today benefits from the lessons DDS Track taught me. How to scope a product that can grow. How to make architecture decisions that hold up over years, not months. How to balance building what’s needed now against designing for what’s coming next.
If you’re a founder or business leader sitting on a specialized operational problem and wondering whether custom software is worth the investment, this is exhibit A. The right solution, built with deep domain understanding, doesn’t just solve today’s problem. It can become a product in its own right.
Congratulations to the Reynolds & Reynolds team on the launch. I can’t wait to see where Parts Flex Logistics goes from here.